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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

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Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#661

Post by JohnFen »

albertzeyer wrote: post #391
codalan wrote: post #135

It's not just scrollbars. It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the wind…

On Linux (e.g. KDE), you can simply Ctrl + mouse drag the window, and then click anywhere you want. This makes it even much simpler than the need of clicking on the border, even with larger borders. You actually don't need any window border at all then, or it can be full of other utilities. There is also some software for Windows to do the same.

> You actually don't need any window border at all then

Even if that was a great solution for everybody, you still need a window border. Or at least I do. I need that visual separation from all of the other windows on my desktop, and I need it to be thicker than one or two damned pixels.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#662

Post by yowlingcat »

CRConrad wrote: post #585
chefandy wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, and that informs users interaction style. "Informs"?!? Deforms! WTF does phone usage have to do with sabotaging the UI on a computer???

People are generationally creatures of habit. Newer generations are entering the workforce for whom their first personal computing device was a touchscreen smartphone. With that context in mind, it's not surprising that a "native" responsive experience to them will be mobile centric rather than desktop centric. The market then evolves to cater to the needs of its largest cohorts.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#663

Post by JohnFen »

DanielHB wrote: post #428
codalan wrote: post #135

It's not just scrollbars. It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the wind…

Resizable windows are an outdated concept, full-screen applications with tiling capability (think emacs) are much better. Add multiple workspaces just as they are today and it is perfect. Unfortunately Windows and MacOS don't really support this kind of environment very well. Sure you can tile windows, but they are still windows. When you open an application it is not immediately tiled or opened in another workspace…

> full-screen applications with tiling capability (think emacs) are much better.

For you. For me, that's substantially worse.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#664

Post by JohnFen »

DanielHB wrote: post #440
bayindirh wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody says "floating windows are dead", but I fail to get sold on the tiling concept. For people working on 3 windows, that may be acceptable, but if one's juggling 10 windows on a couple of desktops, things get hairy fast. Window resizing also helps a lot of things in terminal. Sometimes programs write log lines so long, I have to resize the terminal wider than the screen itself to make sure that every log is wr…

I am thinking that most of the time you want your applications full screen with tiling been an advanced user kind of thing I myself mostly use MacOS without tilling, I just keep all my applications full screen and use multiple workspaces. I prefer to have a single big (32'' at the moment) monitor and just switch workspaces instead But if MacOS had better tilling support I would probably use it more.

> I am thinking that most of the time you want your applications full screen

I have a large screen. It's very rare that I want any application to be full screen. I want to use some of that screen to see other things at the same time.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#666

Post by vladvasiliu »

steve1977 wrote: post #612
vladvasiliu wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar The one benefit I can see is to gain some extra vertical space on the skinny 16:9 screens, especially now that the task bar in windows 11 got thicker and can no longer be moved to a side. They, of course, still haven't gotten around to fixing the auto-hide behavior, so that's still not an option. The rare times I have to use windows, I use…

Usually the smallest "skinny" 16:9 screens you see nowadays on desktops are 24". Windows was perfectly usable on 15" 4:3 screens. The first iMacs were 15" 4:3. So that as such probably wasn't the issue. http://www.displaywars.com/24-inch-16x9-vs-15-inch-4x3 What might be an issue though is the use of laptops.

Yeah, I was mostly thinking of laptops.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#667

Post by JohnFen »

puzzlingcaptcha wrote: post #448
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 problem with about:config options is that Mozilla sometimes decides to remove them (based on telemetry numbers perhaps). The usual path for an unpopular option seems to be GUI -> about:config -> The Void.

about:config options are workarounds, not solutions. This is for two reasons: first, they can change or vanish at any time, as you point out. Second, they're not very discoverable. You generally have to be told about them to know they're there.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#668

Post by zamadatix »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #150
codalan wrote: post #135

It's not just scrollbars. It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the wind…

I am coming to the opinion that Windows XP was the maximum usable interface, and we should have stopped there [0]. But then, I might just be old and telling the kids to get off my lawn. [0] this is definitely true for Windows. All subsequent versions of Windows have had worse UX.

I'd love the windows 2000 style classic theme with the overall customizability improvements in XP with the UI feature sets of newer versions.

E.g. booting up 2000 by itself it absolutely sucks. I mean, it looks great... but you can't tile windows, you can't resize the command prompt dynamically, you don't have DPI support, a lot of the little victories like pinning and grouping aren't there, the way it draws often causes ghost trails, virtual desktops aren't a thing, a surprising number of things were modal when they didn't need to be. It has great parts but the problem isn't newer versions threw them all away with no improvement it's that not every change was an improvement.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#669

Post by JohnFen »

dzaima wrote: post #365
JohnFen wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> scroll wheels on a mouse But that breaks down if you have to scroll a very long way.

There are extensions for chrome and firefox[0] that can allow for continued scrolling by scroll wheel to exponentionally (as in, actually exponential) speed up. With this, I pretty much never use the scrollbar UI element as an input. [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromium-wheel-smo... , https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yass-we

Yeah, I've tried them. They are not a good solution for me, because of the lack of accuracy.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#670

Post by irrational »

reportgunner wrote: post #483
irrational wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biology. I’m in my 50s and get an eye exam every year. According to my optometrist my prescription has been stable for about a decade, but I can definitely tell the difference. My eyes do not focus very fast anymore, my eyes do not adjust going from a light space to a dark space or vice versa very fast anymore. I now have to hold books and my phone away from me to bring them into focus. Same with white text on dark b…

What about yellow text on brown background like [0] ? I use this combo in my editor to avoid changing to light theme on bright days and dark theme at night. [0] https://i.imgur.com/Ynvrm3p.png

It is not as easy to read as black on a light background.
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