Who Killed the Scrollbar? • Hacker News Board

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#101

Post by vezycash » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

Let's not dance around in a circle - Apple started this with their "minimalist design." First on desktop and later with mobile.

Fact of life is everyone copies Apple. Apple doesn't copy and paste things. They'll think deeply before copying. And will modify things to fit their unique needs and situation.

Unfortunately, those who copy Apple switch off their brains and pursue the "looks" ALONE, ignore the "feel" and just mess everything up.

The next big culprit is Google's Android with their let's just hide everything - hamburger.

Microsoft, the final boss, attempted to beat Apple in design. The result was Metro UI - a beautiful, text heavy, flat, design (they changed the name too many times to keep track off.)

Microsoft turned off their brains as well. The result:

They hid every thing - scroll bars, status bars and title bars. Wasted valuable screen real estate - empty spaces everywhere. Created a much hated start-screen with scroll bars that moved horizontally instead of vertically. And to make matters worse, moved in the opposite direction of scroll wheel. (Perfect if navigating with a finger but very confusing if using the mouse. It clashed with 20 years of mouse knowledge)

That's why people hated Windows 8.

Both Apple and Google riffed off Metro design. Google calls theirs material design, don't know what Apple named theirs.

If this article was titled, Who Killed Ports, 3.5mm audio jack, repairability, screws, or upgradable ram? The answer would still be Apple.

Summary: Prioritizing form over function is cancerous.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#102

Post by zozbot234 » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

mixmastamyk wrote: post #80

Scroll bars and top menus! One factor was the removal from the market of anything but 16:9 displays which sucks as well. I want my workstation UI back and to return the fischer-price bullshit on every OS. Windows and gnome are the worst, every thing they do in the name of progress makes computers harder to use. I miss the simplicity of Windows 2000/XP classic, been downhill from there. Ubuntu Mate is good but is suff…

I can see the issues w/ Windows, but what's your beef with GNOME? It's the only UX I know of that actually makes a touchscreen usable for non-trivial tasks. (And many laptops feature touchscreens by now. Often with something like a fully-rotating hinge, to enable touch-only use.)

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#103

Post by cronix » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

...and hijacking scroll behavior. Please stop that and just use the defaults, like everyone expects. I'm tired of getting to a site and having it scroll pages at a time when it should just scroll a few lines. And then trying to get back to the correct spot is a pain. Who does this stuff and why do you think it's necessary? What problem do you think you are solving by doing this? I just hit the back button. I'm not going to struggle and fight the browser to digest whatever it is you thought was important enough to print, because you've made it unnecessarily difficult and complicated to consume.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#104

Post by buboard » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

rb808 wrote: post #50

buboard wrote: post #3

Flipping flip i agree! It's not just scrollbars. I hate the mobilification of everything. I hate that desktop designs are imitating the nonexistent information density of phones. Bring back menubars, and extensive left-hand hierarchies . Even in mobile, it's more practical for me. I like a full page where i can zoom in and out faster between its parts rather than scrolling up and down all the time (I browse reddit in…

But our A/B testing shows a 5% increase in engagement by making it crappy.

Oh yeah, i was pressing all your buttons randomly because none of them were obvious what they do. I was surely engaging with your app very much, while swearing.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#105

Post by coldtea » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

ibero wrote: post #34

coldtea wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a pretty fluff piece. There isn't really much explored here. It's not supposed to explore anything, be amusing, or whatever. It's just a rant about a certain specific UI trend. > The only interesting idea I can write out is that the author says that knowing the length/size of an article/book is intrinsically good That's not "the only interesting idea", in the sense that there were supposed to be more but ar…

For one, I remember a Google talk where they mentioned how the completion rate of e-books were higher than physical ones. One of the theories which stuck with me was that the reader not being aware of the end of the book could have been* a driver.

Yeah, this might be true, but that's a problem for the content provider I think -- or even not even for them (since you have already bought their book).

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#106

Post by JohnFen » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:42 PM UTC

ibero wrote: post #5

This is a pretty fluff piece. There isn't really much explored here. The only interesting idea I can write out is that the author says that knowing the length/size of an article/book is intrinsically good. I do wonder if that is necessarily true. Maybe one can argue that knowing the length of a written word has resulted in less people engaging?

> Maybe one can argue that knowing the length of a written word has resulted in less people engaging?

Maybe, but valuing "engagement" over pleasing customers is a big part of what's wrong with a lot of software today.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#107

Post by buboard » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:42 PM UTC

mark-r wrote: post #55

thrower123 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop software has never recovered from Office adopting the terrible Ribbon element instead of proper menus and toolbars.

Have you run into lots of desktop apps using a Ribbon style interface, other than Office? Microsoft didn't do themselves any favors by trying to patent the design and keep an iron fist on it.

Foxit PDF reader does it and it's annoying as hell.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#108

Post by fxleach » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:43 PM UTC

After the 5th "flipping" I stopped flipping reading the post.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#109

Post by JohnFen » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:44 PM UTC

ibero wrote: post #34

coldtea wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a pretty fluff piece. There isn't really much explored here. It's not supposed to explore anything, be amusing, or whatever. It's just a rant about a certain specific UI trend. > The only interesting idea I can write out is that the author says that knowing the length/size of an article/book is intrinsically good That's not "the only interesting idea", in the sense that there were supposed to be more but ar…

For one, I remember a Google talk where they mentioned how the completion rate of e-books were higher than physical ones. One of the theories which stuck with me was that the reader not being aware of the end of the book could have been* a driver.

How did they determine this? Last I checked, physical books didn't have telemetry.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#110

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:44 PM UTC

wmichelin wrote: post #2

> It's not so bad on desktops, and I can restore it there anyway via CSS. I wouldn't recommend trying to modify DOM elements via CSS or extensions if you can avoid it. You're going to run into some broken web experiences. Regarding scrollbars, you can set your OS to always show them. As a web dev, I'm out here trying to advocate to never screw with scrollbars.

The restyling is local only restyling, for my own use, and within my local browser stylesheets (generally using Stylus), only.

I've explicitly made that point in the example Codepen showing that styling:

https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/QwXBEO

More generally, I've long held that Web design as practiced isn't the solution, it's the problem.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_...

I've been toying with the notion of an FYWD browser, standing for "Fine Young Western Dinosaurs" or "Flip Your Web Design", where some of the letters in "flip" were originally different.