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“We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”

bugzilla.mozilla.org

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Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”

#21

Post by dangrossman »

SwellJoe wrote: post #9

I 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…

If you'd like to know what a custom CSS scrollbar looks like in practice, in 2015, log in to your Google Analytics account (I noticed you use it on your website) with Chrome. Not only do people want to change the scroll bar, but probably half the internet-using population sees custom scroll bars daily, since Google uses them heavily (Gmail, Docs, etc as well).

Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”

#22

Post by scrollaway »

thristian wrote: post #12
scrollaway wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And what, exactly, is going to happen if people "abuse" scrollbar styling? Or button styling?

Are we here to fight lame design fads by preventing people from building cool apps?

Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”

#23

Post by aptwebapps »

SwellJoe wrote: post #9

I 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 don't think it's just the browser's scrollbars one the side, and sometimes the bottom, of the page. It's all scrollbars inside the page as well. They're traditionally considered part of the OS UI so are left alone. At the moment, people who really want to change the scrollbars internal to the page can replace them with js scrollbars.

Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”

#24

Post by jbeda »

I remember when we first did this on IE5.5. It fell out naturally from some improvements to the rendering system and a dev (forgot his name! Don?) prototyped it to show off his new subsystem. It eventually got supported because, at the time, we would do anything we could to differentiate.

Long time ago...

Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”

#25

Post by scrollaway »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #8
sergiotapia wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

I agree, and I personally really hate it when websites provide their own scrolling mechanism, as it usually doesn't support two-finger (mouse wheel) scroll, doesn't have acceleration, doesn't have my OS scroll speed, etc. IMO overriding scroll bars on your site / app is almost always a bad idea, as it leads to poor UX / usability. Edit: I'd also extend my opinion to cover things like a strip of items which must be sc…

I absolutely agree that reimplementing scrolling logic is absolutely awful. It's an accessibility nightmare.

But scrollbar styling is very different to scrolling logic. We're not talking about stealing people's mousewheels here, we're talking about changing scrollbar themes.

This is important for apps which want native scrolling logic inside their app but want their app to look native. The only alternative, in fact, is to reimplement scrolling logic inside the app. Performance suffers, accessibility suffers, everyone loses.

Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”

#26

Post by whoopdedo »

Scroll bars stand in an uncomfortable place with one foot on the WM side and the other in the application. The user wants to be able to control the size, scale, and position of the window without asking permission from the app. (And who was the evil programmer who gave web sites the ability to disable zooming? But I digress.) But an app that's at the mercy of the operating system for drawing its scroll bars is going to lose usability if it wants to provide infinite scrolling, or simulate a slide-show with vertical position. In those cases it would be better to let the app control the appearance of the scroll bars.

Which is to say, the regular window scroll bar that we're familiar with is being overloaded for two different purposes: to interact with the app and to interact with the WM. Perhaps we should have two scroll bars to avoid this confusion?

Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”

#27

Post by vvpan »

SwellJoe wrote: post #9

I 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…

So in 20+ years of building things you haven't worked with a designer who customized scroll-bars? It as if you haven't worked with a designer at all.

Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”

#29

Post by mikelat »

radley wrote: post #28

I think the simple solution is adding a "light/dark" setting for browsers. We certainly don't need every color of the rainbow (omg gross), but this simple option could be universal and solve most requests.

Better yet, the browsers should easily be able to predict the dominant color of the page by parsing the CSS file and most of the DOM, and pick a complimentary scrollbar contrast accordingly. Maybe do that and allow override to light/dark.

Re: “We would be willing to set up a $2,500 bounty to implement scrollbar styling”

#30

Post by raldi »

scrollaway wrote: post #7
wodenokoto wrote: post #2

Please link to the actual place on the page you are referring to. The discussion spans 14 years. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790#c188

I realized my mistake as soon as I pressed send. I can't find a way to edit it. Mods?

I like it better as-is. As the top HN comment mentions, it's very interesting to skim the whole history, and see how times have changed. And how they haven't.
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