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Who Killed the Scrollbar?

ello.co

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Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#161

Post by Avshalom »

eropple wrote: post #58
flyinghamster wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incessant hamburgerization is something that I also find annoying. Any time I have to set up Firefox, the very first thing I do is enable the menu bar. My desktop isn't a tablet - stop trying to make it one!

It's interesting that you turn on the menu bar. To me this isn't a "tablet" feature at all--it's just a "screen real estate is precious" feature. Even when hidden it's only an Alt press away.

We've got bigger higher resolution screens for every device, screen real estate is only getting less precious and we're still losing affordances like scroll bars and being able to see the top level of the menu hierarchy.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#162

Post by sdegutis »

yeldarb wrote: post #56
city41 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was pretty blown away to see that Dropbox's hamburger menu opens to take over the entire screen, including on desktop. In other words, they only considered mobile in their design. You can try it even if you don't have an account, just go to dropbox.com and click the hamburger in the upper right.

Looks like it only does this on sufficiently "small" screens. This is what it looks like on my external display: https://imgur.com/a/DJBiYJ6

Mine's at 1280 and it's full menu, almost entirely whitespace. Makes it kinda fun though, feels like finding an easter egg.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#163

Post by lottin »

sp332 wrote: post #39
flyinghamster wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incessant hamburgerization is something that I also find annoying. Any time I have to set up Firefox, the very first thing I do is enable the menu bar. My desktop isn't a tablet - stop trying to make it one!

I can see why they did it. Now that screens are ~universally 16:9, vertical space is at a premium. It would be nice if the hamburger menu actually replicated the same functionality though.

16:9 is a ratio whereas the amount of vertical space is an absolute amount. I don't think the two are related, unless screens got wider at the expense of height, which surely is not the case.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#164

Post by TheKarateKid »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #53

I'm old enough that I started out building desktop apps with native widgets. You had consistent, easy to use UIs, and they were pretty much the same no matter what application you where in. Building the UI was considered they easy part. You could even draw the thing with drawing tools! Since the native widgets were designed by people who spend all day thinking about UI, user testing UI, etc everything pretty much jus…

Good point! This is especially the case in iOS/Android, where almost every app uses their own completely custom UI and design on everything "just because". Remember when most apps used the iOS/Android OS-provided UI's? Customization was there when needed but dialog boxes, drop-downs, etc. were uniform across the OS.

This is why every app and its mother didn't need a UI/UX designer until the past few years.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#165

Post by eropple »

jandrese wrote: post #160
eropple wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm super curious--how often do you actually use the menu and what do you use it for? I ask because I literally can't remember the last time I did in Firefox; everything's a keyboard shortcut. Fullscreen is F11, inspector is F12, refresh is F5 (even go-to-URL-bar is F6).

I pull down the History menu reasonably often. I'm one of the few people who still uses bookmarks too. I found that hitting alt was annoying and I'd forget about the menu and try to find stuff on the Hamburger menu instead and get annoyed.

Huh. I use bookmarks a lot, too--but I use them via the omnibar. Type the first few letters and I'll find it from there.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#166

Post by MisterBastahrd »

m4r35n357 wrote: post #38

Idiots removed the triangles at top & bottom that you could use to scroll without dragging. I think they did it because they are stupid and evil.

Other idiots also made the scrollbar thinner, harder to see, and hidden unless you purposefully move your mouse cursor to the side of the page. With a mouse and good eyesight, it's not that big of a deal, but I would imagine it's an accessibility issue looking for a place to happen.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#167

Post by TheKarateKid »

vezycash wrote: post #101

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 jus…

Apple at least kept the minimal UI design where it belonged -- mobile. They also have a history of getting it right - the sole reason for the iPod and iPhone's success was it's beautifully simplistic design, especially on the software.

Microsoft in a panic, went overboard and started the trend that our 26" desktop monitors didn't need much on it. At least they corrected most of the issues by now, but many other companies haven't.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#168

Post by dredmorbius »

joshstrange wrote: post #158
dredmorbius wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For smaller screens, scrollbar-on-scroll (with a slow fade of 0.5 - 2s or so) would be a reasonable compromise, if the scrollbar were also a manipulation interface, and not merely informational. The default Android PDF viewer operates in this manner, and provides a grabbable scroll control. Much of the rest of the app is otherwise less than impressive, but this would be a useful motif to pick up. I'd offered the feed…

> For smaller screens, scrollbar-on-scroll (with a slow fade of 0.5 - 2s or so) would be a reasonable compromise, if the scrollbar were also a manipulation interface, and not merely informational. > The default Android PDF viewer operates in this manner, and provides a grabbable scroll control. Much of the rest of the app is otherwise less than impressive, but this would be a useful motif to pick up. I wish I had an…

Addressing the last: Ello's descent into UI/UX hell was among the reasons I abandoned it.

The Drive PDF Viewer (default PDF viewer on Android) scroll behaviour isn't perfect, but it's a reasonable compromise with minimal surprises (principle of least astonishment) for the platform.

I quite honestly prefer paginated PDFs in general for online reading, as they follow numerous predictable behaviours, with PocketBook and FBReader my preferred apps for this.

The Internet Archive's online BookReader app is also excellent, in its paginated mode. When set to portrait aspect ratios, it converts to a scrolling mode which I really dislike.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#169

Post by qubex »

grawprog wrote: post #15
wlesieutre wrote: post #6

> 2. No flipping way to quickly navigate to the top or bottom of the post. I don't know what the state of this is on Android, but iOS 13 lets you grab the scrollbar and go immediately to wherever you want in a document. The scrollbar doesn't show up by default, so it's a 2-step operation. Scroll a bit to make the scroll indicator appear, then grab it and scroll faster. Works well but I doubt many people are aware of…

>I don't know what the state of this is on Android, but iOS 13 lets you grab the scrollbar and go immediately to wherever you want in a document. It's inconsistent on android, it works like that with most things but strangely not with some apps. You can't grab the scrollbar in Retroarch for example, even though you can see it. It makes scrolling through huge lists of ROMs extremely aggravating.

> It’s inconsistent in Android

The only thing consistent about Android is its inconsistency, but even that can vary.

On a more serious note, I can’t find the date this was originally published (??? Seriously?!) so I don’t know what OS and browser versions were prevalent at the time of writing.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#170

Post by CivBase »

I agree that scrollbars should be preserved. However, mobile screens are small and the classic scrollbars we were used to a decade ago take up precious space.

Actually, mobile scrollbars cause problems for me pretty often. My fat fingers sometimes trigger the scrollbar instead when I mean to tap an element on the right side of the screen. It's very infuriating when you suddenly jump to some random spot in a large list and have to scroll to find where you were and try again.

I would love to see I think the solution is to come up with a design that indicates an element is scrollable. Maybe by darkening it at the bottom? A scrollbar could be toggled when the user scrolls far enough, then hidden again when the user stops scrolling for a while. Idk, I'm not a designer.

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