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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

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Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#591

Post by indymike »

chefandy wrote: post #511
Podgajski wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we are talking UI we need to talk about Apple. The first thin I do on MacOS is turn on the scroll bars. Yes, MacOS Has them set as "Only Show When Scrolling" by default, which is probably the most ridiculous setting.

It seems like most people who scroll use touch, wheel, or other non-scroll-bar interfaces, and the scroll bars are just a visual indicator of document size and position while navigating it. I know I do— and have for 20 years unless I was using a shitty laptop without a scrolling input method. Maybe unless I'm scrolling through literally millions of lines of text, which is infrequent enough that I'd prefer to have the…

> Phone and tablet usage has outpaced regular computer usage for quite some time

This does not excuse making terrible user experiences elsewhere.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#592

Post by baloki »

michaelteter wrote: post #590

I know it feels clunky (perhaps) aesthetically to have thick scroll bars and thick sliding dividers and thick window borders, but I would choose ergnomics over prettiness. Even as a normal human with good motor control, good equipment, and decent eyesight, I routinely encounter situations (macOS) where I have to carefully move the pointer back and forth across a region where I know the "line" (divider, border) is so…

First thing I do on MacOS is turn on always show scrollbars tbh.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#593

Post by trealira »

whartung wrote: post #167
nine_k wrote: post #59

The author sees half the problem and offers the worse half of a solution. A scrollbar is not only a control, it's also an indicator . It shows where your viewport is relative to the bigger view, e.g. a long list. Hiding scrollbars, like some [redacted] GUIs like macOS do, is just acutely impolite, much like making buttons indistinguishable from text, or putting light grey text on a light grey background. A solution e…

Scroll wheels and gestures are paging mechanisms, a scrollbar does that as well but it’s also a “take me to the middle of the document” control. Assuming a properly responsive document (not something you can take for granted today, especially on the web), you can readily use the scrollbar to navigate large ranges within a document, especially large ones. Countless times, on large, old PDFs with no links and that use…

> Scroll wheels and gestures are paging mechanisms, a scrollbar does that as well but it’s also a “take me to the middle of the document” control.

IME, only on Linux am I able to click on an arbitrary location beneath or atop the scrollbar and be taken there immediately. On Windows, it seems that clicking below the scrollbar is equivalent to scrolling down once. If you want to go all the way to the bottom of the document or webpage, you have to drag the scrollbar all the way down manually. I actually find it kind of annoying. I don't know about MacOS, as I haven't used it since I was a kid.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#595

Post by hollerith »

trealira wrote: post #593
whartung wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scroll wheels and gestures are paging mechanisms, a scrollbar does that as well but it’s also a “take me to the middle of the document” control. Assuming a properly responsive document (not something you can take for granted today, especially on the web), you can readily use the scrollbar to navigate large ranges within a document, especially large ones. Countless times, on large, old PDFs with no links and that use…

> Scroll wheels and gestures are paging mechanisms, a scrollbar does that as well but it’s also a “take me to the middle of the document” control. IME, only on Linux am I able to click on an arbitrary location beneath or atop the scrollbar and be taken there immediately. On Windows, it seems that clicking below the scrollbar is equivalent to scrolling down once. If you want to go all the way to the bottom of the docu…

>On Windows, it seems that clicking below the scrollbar is equivalent to scrolling down once. If you want to go all the way to the bottom of the document or webpage, you have to drag the scrollbar all the way down manually. I actually find it kind of annoying.

Have you tried changing the behavior in Settings?

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#596

Post by steve1977 »

shiroiuma wrote: post #402
masklinn wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monochrome lines are cool tho, ink or charcoal can be gorgeous, and “barely visible pixels” are genuinely needed to get them. That aside, high dpi displays are still a rare sight on desktops, there’s not many of them and the aspect ratios and ancillary features are extremely limited.

>That aside, high dpi displays are still a rare sight on desktops No, they aren't. ALL displays these days are high-dpi, when you compare to the 640x480 and 800x600 screens that were normal in the late 1990s. But the window managers back then were FAR better (in functionality and appearance) than what most of us use today.

Not really. DPI is dots per inch. As screens were much smaller then, their DPI (or rather PPI) wasn’t much less.

For example, Macintosh was 72 ppi for a long time ( it is 109 ppi now).

My first LCD screen was 15“. And that was for a desktop, not a laptop. 17“ or 19“ were for rich guys or graphics designers ;)

What is certainly the case though is that GUIs nowadays are much more wasteful with space.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#597

Post by kaba0 »

Pannoniae wrote: post #206
Gigachad wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I want the app to just set its look exactly. I really don't care if different programs look slightly different as long as its internally consistent in app. What I hate is installing a program that was designed for a KDE distro and because you run gnome all the icons are the same color as the background and alignments on things are whack. Package it all up in a flatpak so it looks and works exactly the same o…

"One complete and verified experience." These words sound sickening to me. None of these have anything to do with accessibility, or respecting the user. The user should be in control of his computer. That includes the programs on it. Locking it down so you can have "verified authentic design" is just straight-up user-hostile.

And who will make sure that the program actually works properly in that one-off hacked up, “press spacebar to heat up CPU” configuration you have?

Linux userspace is buggy, and I think this very-minimalistic approach sort of grown out from frustration about that. And they may be right, maintainers really don’t have the resources to do much better, especially when most frameworks they depend on has their own share of fatal, almost impossible to fix bugs.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#598

Post by happymellon »

adrian_b wrote: post #401
happymellon wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use XFCE btw No offense, but I cannot possibly trust your judgement when you use a DE that, by default, is the classic example of no window borders for the mouse to grab onto.

This must depend on how you configure it. I do not remember how I have configured it, perhaps the window border width is determined by the window theme (I use Chicago95), but I have also been using XFCE for many years and I have decent-sized window borders on my 4k monitors and my mouse theme (Hackneyed 48x48) has extremely obvious mouse cursor shape changes whenever you touch the window borders, so they are easy to…

It is defined by the theme.

The default theme that XFCE ships with has a 1px grabbing area set. So it's not that the cursor doesn't change, it's just you have to be very precise.

There are "fixes" where people hack the theme to increase the size of some transparent images to force a larger grabble area or telling people that they are holding it wrong.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#599

Post by autoexec »

donatj wrote: post #160
autoexec wrote: post #20

Once again I have to give firefox credit for giving users the tools in about:config to disable this. It's cute fluff at best and annoying/abusive at worst. The browser's UI should more or less be fully off the table when it comes to what a website can change, and that includes scrollbars.

> The browser's UI should more or less be fully off the table when it comes to what a website can change, and that includes scrollbars. I have a very strong recollection of adamantly defending IE6's ability to style scroll bars on forums in the early 2000s, whereas the Mozilla crowd at the time called it an abomination. As an older man with both the power of hindsight and the weakness of failing sight, I can admit I…

It's not just your eyes, we were using very different screen resolutions back then and UI was lot clunkier looking too. Having the option is nice, but being able to disable that is critical

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#600

Post by eru »

least wrote: post #567
abofh wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I suffer from an eye pigment issue, meaning bright actually hurts. Old screens don't hurt even on white. New screens physically hurt. You, however, should stay in the dark.

Does being outside generally hurt your eyes? Most complaints about brightness of screens has to do with the contrast between it and ambient lighting. When I'm in a dark room a bright screen is going to be hard to use. In a well lit room it's not an issue. It's kind of why ambient light sensing is a nice feature.

> Does being outside generally hurt your eyes?

I'm not the OP, but yes, going outside sometimes also hurts my eyes, depending on how bad the sun is.

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