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Scrollbar Blindness

svenkadak.com

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Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#351

Post by pseudalopex »

derefr wrote: post #269
thirdtry wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got bit by infinite scrolling yesterday. I liked an article, clicked in the URL, copied and pasted it into a group chat with my team... and then noticed it was the wrong URL. The fine website had "helpfully" autoscrolled a smidge into the next article, so it updated the URL box to the next article. Lesson learned-- read before pasting...

You might resent the autoscroll on the website, but did you consider that the group chat program also has an infinite scroll, for chat history? Imagine what a hypothetical scrollbar for the group-chat program would look like if it had one, and if that scrollbar actually represented your relative position in a complete timeline going back to when the chat-group was created. :)

Consider that an actual timeline is a better interface for chat history than an infinitely scrolling log.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#352

Post by avhon1 »

SCNP wrote: post #328
soco wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially with the usual screen ratios nowadays, their huge width goes unused 99% of the time anyway. So there's an only 1% incentive from usability side to remove the right vertical scrollbar... As a matter of fact, I actually use in my Firefox vertical tabs stacked left, to spare me some vertical space on the laptop screen.

If I might ask, what are you using for vertical tabs? I haven't found a good add-on that shows the tabs on the side and also hides the tabs on the top.

Firefox Quantum made it so that extensions can't hide the tabs on top. It can only be done manually, by making and editing a userChrome.css file.

https://superuser.com/questions/1268732/how-to-hide-tab-bar-...

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#353

Post by mmphosis »

jakub_g wrote: post #71

If you read between the lines, you should understand that the root cause of issue is the macOS developer monoculture. All you need is one Windows or Linux-based developer in your team to catch those kind of issues. But so many dev teams are macOS-only those days, whereas, apart from US and 2-3 other rich countries, 80%+ or even more of actual desktop users are Windows-based. (There are many other problems with macOS…

Scroll bars have always been a compromise. Today, I have a 4K monitor connected to a 2K laptop with a USB-C port for yet another big monitor or more. I can span a window across 3 big monitors, and still the horizontal scroll bar appears because of the platform agnostic attitude of "good enough."

Up until Android and iOS mostly phones and tablets, we had a monoculture Intel and Windows. Windows is still almost 90% of actual laptop/desktop users. [1]

I am an ex-Mac developer. I do not have a modern Mac, I do not have an iPhone, and I set the date/time format to pretty much whatever I want on Linux, Windows, and 15 year old Mac OS X. And, I just have to deal with broken date/time interfaces on the web. For far too long, I would go along with the Intel / Windows developer monoculture of "good enough" software, and comments like Mac? Linux? What's that?

[1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#354

Post by wnevets »

reaperducer wrote: post #163
supernova87a wrote: post #18

I have to pile onto the criticism of the hidden scroll bars, and other similar features (like the hidden buttons of PDF viewers now, such as in Chrome). Discoverability is a problem. For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features, these things can be utterly mind-boggling and frustrating. Even I was stumped for a good minute the first time trying to print/save/download a PDF when…

For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features You don't even have to be elderly. The 20-somethings in the office (pre-pandemic) had no idea that on an inconsistent smattering of Apple apps, if you pull down, a hidden search bar magically appears. How did that conversation go? Dev: Where do you want the search bar to go? Designer: Put it somewhere that no one will ever see it, or…

>I think people in the SV/HN bubble play the "what about the elderly?" card too often, because we're afraid to admit that we, too, don't know how stuff works anymore.

Perhaps but even when I don't know how an app works I can usually figure it out, either by trying different things or just googling. Older generations tend to be afraid of "breaking" the device and avoid doing anything they dont already know.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#355

Post by toast0 »

reaperducer wrote: post #171
ManskY wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has always been a struggle with UX design, people want simplicity but at the same time they want clarity and complexity of ideas. People want great knowledge, but they don't want to read about the nuances that makes it a great knowledge. There are valid reasons for both sides of the equation, it is just difficult to find the balance to satisfied the myriad of different perspectives.

it is just difficult to find the balance to satisfied the myriad of different perspectives. We used to achieve this balance with a manual. A printed manual. Not a URL printed in 3 point Helvetica in light gray on a white background on a tiny leaflet in amongst a dozen similar-looking regulatory leaflets that will all go into the recycling bin when the new shiny shows up.

You can't write a printed manual about how to use the product unless you're pretty sure that's how it works.

Although, you probably still need to print a leaflet with updates between when you sent the manual out and when you finalized the software.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#356

Post by jonpurdy »

jemorya wrote: post #115
scaryclam wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a link for something I use on such news and blog sites: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ I works a surprising amount of the time!

I use this every single day on my locked-down work laptop. It fixes so many sites! I recommend it as often as I can, and I'm surprised that its use is not more widespread.

Very happy to have seen this! I like that Alisdair uses a sticky header on the page to verify that it works.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#357

Post by arrayjumper »

pb7 wrote: post #319
arrayjumper wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Guess which ones often have problems joining zoom meetings As a linux user, I'd like to say that I've seen that happen just as often with OSX users on my team. I think that's just Zoom's shitty app. But I do agree about peripheral hardware issues plaguing Linux. Bluetooth headphones are still such a hassle on Ubuntu 20.04.

I think it's crazy to seriously consider using an OS where something as basic as Bluetooth is a hassle.

Bluetooth in general isn't a hassle. Bluetooth audio is a little bit of a hassle in the sense that there's a workaround that you have to do.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#358

Post by eikenberry »

hellofunk wrote: post #181
xur17 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For folks considering the switch, I highly recommend considering linux as well. I've used both macOS and ubuntu as a development environment, and bug wise they are on par, but linux really excels at having a true "native" development environment. Docker without a weird VM, true bash, etc.

To suggest that “bug wise“ it is the same between Mac and Linux is a bit of a stretch. I work in a team where the developers are mostly split between Mac and Ubuntu. Guess which ones often have problems joining zoom meetings or attaching their machines to a projector for a presentation? There are a lot of things that you generally don’t have to worry about much if you’re using a Mac. I’m not gonna say that one of the…

Seems like a trade-off based on my experiences. On Macs you'll get a less bugs in proprietary, user-oriented apps (like Zoom). On Linux you'll get a less bugs on free software apps, developer tooling and server side apps. Though I think it mostly comes down to where you spend most of your time and what you are working on.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#359

Post by acqq »

Klathmon wrote: post #217
baggy_trough wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse than undiscoverable features are land mine features, where some subtle gesture triggers a wild and unwanted mode change. Extra credit if the mode change is hard to get out of.

There's a windows feature like this which I hate with a passion. If you grab a window and shake it side to side, it minimizes all open windows... So sometimes I'll grab a window to move to my left monitor, decide instead I want it on the right one, and suddenly everything is gone and I now need to go open every single window one at a time. It even took me months to understand that the shaking was what caused it. I wo…

The one I'm unlucky to hit is the "icon resizing" that happens when a moving action on the thumbpad is performed in combination with the pressed ctrl key, which sometimes is not actually pressed but the OS believes it is (some "zombie" state). Happened to me on different notebooks and even on the desktop.

I don't think anybody needs that "quick" way to do that, and that nobody needs to change the icon sizes often. I have no idea if that misfeature could be blocked.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#360

Post by RonanTheGrey »

chrismorgan wrote: post #280

Strongly related: viewport units (vw, vh, vmin, vmax) are fundamentally and irreconcilably broken if your document has scrollbars, because they include the size of document scrollbars, so that 100vw is equal to 100% + 17px if you have a 17px wide scrollbar there (the most likely value on Windows), so now all of a sudden you have a horizontal scrollbar too. Or your nicely calculated layout that thought that 33vw + 33v…

I dealt with this just a few days ago. A client's design was mocked in webflow and it decided to use 'static' for the header at 100vw. Which meant that on browsers that hide the scroll bar, the page jiggles left and right every time you scroll.

That was fun to fix because I had to rebuild the entire header since a ton of other webflow-generated CSS depended on that thing being static.

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