To the naysayers: styling scrollbars has a very valid use-case. Two IDEs that I use most at work are Visual Studio 2012 and JetBrains PyCharm. I always switch to the dark theme on both, and try to use dark styling whenever possible. Simply because the amount of light from two 24" displays can be overwhelming. Both IDEs style the scrollbars to conform to the dark theme. You cannot do that in browser, unless you resort to emulating the scrollbar, like e.g. CodeMirror did. Light grey scrollbars on otherwise dark screens are immediately noticeable and distracting.
“We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”
11–20 of 87 posts
Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
The scroll bar is (or should be!) OS-controlled. Why give people the opportunity to muck up the scroll bar and add their crazy ideas. The browser belongs to the user, not the website.
Yes, those crazy ideas, like styling buttons and text areas. I'm sorry, I can't take this sort of complaint seriously...
Any kind of power, including the ability to style buttons, text-areas or scroll-bars, can be abused. There's always some people that (quite reasonably) feel that widespread abuse of that power justifies withdrawing it, and some people that (quite reasonably) feel that the few really good uses outweigh the potential for abuse.
Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”
#13Should we consider an anti-bounty system where we agree to pay more to the foundation for not implementing a `feature`? I personally, don't like websites breaking the 4th wall.
Websites already implement their own scroll bars - Gmail, Google Spreadsheets, etc.
It would be nice if instead of having to reimplement _everything_ about the scrollbar to just add a feature or two, the native one was customizable. Because frankly, people are going to change it, so might as well make things less buggy.
Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”
#14I was reading through this, just laughing and laughing at how ridiculous it was that people in 2001 thought changing the color of the scroll bar was somehow important or useful. I was all, "Hahah, people were very silly in 2001, and the web was a very silly place." Then, as the years crept ever forward, I began to realize this isn't a blast from the past...it's not like a discussion about the blink tag. It's a real t…
We do find it useful on http://Clara.io in the editor (you have to be logged in to see them) -- we have a complex UI and the standard thick scroll bar is ugly and much too large. So we thin them down and simplify the styling so that they fit more into the overall UI. It is a very pleasing difference.
Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”
#15Should we consider an anti-bounty system where we agree to pay more to the foundation for not implementing a `feature`? I personally, don't like websites breaking the 4th wall.
Websites already implement their own scroll bars - Gmail, Google Spreadsheets, etc. It would be nice if instead of having to reimplement _everything_ about the scrollbar to just add a feature or two, the native one was customizable. Because frankly, people are going to change it, so might as well make things less buggy.
>Websites already implement their own scroll bars - Gmail, Google Spreadsheets, etc.
As an OS X user who enjoys not seeing scrollbars, I find Google's use of them downright intrusive.
Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”
#16Should we consider an anti-bounty system where we agree to pay more to the foundation for not implementing a `feature`? I personally, don't like websites breaking the 4th wall.
Websites already implement their own scroll bars - Gmail, Google Spreadsheets, etc. It would be nice if instead of having to reimplement _everything_ about the scrollbar to just add a feature or two, the native one was customizable. Because frankly, people are going to change it, so might as well make things less buggy.
Gmail uses webkit scrollbar styling, they don't reimplement scrollbars from scratch. If you go to gmail in Firefox it uses the stock scrollbars, which is really a major advantage to Firefox in my mind. It's kind of like when Chrome stopped supporting the tag even though webkit still supported it.
Basically all of the times that I see this feature being used it is to make tiny, mostly transparent, or auto-hiding scrollbars that don't match the system UI at all and are a significant nuisance. I'm sure there are some sites that are styling them reasonably, but it doesn't seem to be the norm, even for the major players that have experienced design teams.
Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”
#17I was reading through this, just laughing and laughing at how ridiculous it was that people in 2001 thought changing the color of the scroll bar was somehow important or useful. I was all, "Hahah, people were very silly in 2001, and the web was a very silly place." Then, as the years crept ever forward, I began to realize this isn't a blast from the past...it's not like a discussion about the blink tag. It's a real t…
We do find it useful on http://Clara.io in the editor (you have to be logged in to see them) -- we have a complex UI and the standard thick scroll bar is ugly and much too large. So we thin them down and simplify the styling so that they fit more into the overall UI. It is a very pleasing difference.
This is just my one experience (and you certainly know better the needs of your own product) but you are gaining "that looks nice" in exchange for "this is harder to use because the target is smaller and harder to click".
Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”
#18I was reading through this, just laughing and laughing at how ridiculous it was that people in 2001 thought changing the color of the scroll bar was somehow important or useful. I was all, "Hahah, people were very silly in 2001, and the web was a very silly place." Then, as the years crept ever forward, I began to realize this isn't a blast from the past...it's not like a discussion about the blink tag. It's a real t…
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Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”
#19I was reading through this, just laughing and laughing at how ridiculous it was that people in 2001 thought changing the color of the scroll bar was somehow important or useful. I was all, "Hahah, people were very silly in 2001, and the web was a very silly place." Then, as the years crept ever forward, I began to realize this isn't a blast from the past...it's not like a discussion about the blink tag. It's a real t…
I'm not a designer either, but I can see their point of view: they're being paid to make a website internally consistent, and if they can't style scrollbars, then either they're stuck with a bland, vapid style that looks reasonable across all platforms, or they make something that's cool and awesome and makes their clients happy right up until the first scroll-bar appears, at which point it looks ridiculous (in particular, think about a where you can style the border to match all your other form-fields, but not the scroll-bar, so you wind up with two visual styles pressed right up against one another). Being responsible for something you can't really control is frustrating for anyone, so I have a measure of sympathy for the designers who want stylable scrollbars.
Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scrollbar style is the 4th wall? How arbitrary can you get?
The scroll bar is (or should be!) OS-controlled. Why give people the opportunity to muck up the scroll bar and add their crazy ideas. The browser belongs to the user, not the website.
I'm not clear why it's good that you can style every other UI component except this one.