Who Killed the Scrollbar? • Hacker News Board

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#91

Post by antocv » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:36 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #23

agumonkey wrote: post #12

I'm born in the 80s so it's not totally objective, but I know there's something wrong when I boot up a win95 box and I don't miss 99% of so called innovation regarding UI.

I doubt it's nostalgia, even though i m old too. It's just a lot more efficent and faster to use, mouse and keyboard-wise. I often think to roll back to my windows 7 as a more sane desktop environment. Some of the biggest offenses i 've seen are google's web apps. Total loss of hierarchy and replacement with elusive self-hiding buttons, even when it's clear from their use case that they should never have been hamburg…

KDE or plasma whatever its name, is basically unchanged from 1995 UI philosophy. The closest we can have today in 2019.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#92

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:36 PM UTC

notadoc wrote: post #45

Surely this is related to a concurrent thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21353920 It's the flat design trend. It is unintuitive by design.

It is.

I'd posted a link to the piece on that discussion and decided to toss it into the submission queue on a lark. This got more attention than I'd expected.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356495

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#93

Post by thrower123 » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:36 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.

I do see a lot of Windows software and utilities that have tried to copy it; there's a set of Telerik controls implementing most of the pattern.

It's just unfortunate, because it started the trend of reducing and hiding functionality. With less examples of what high density software looked and worked like, people don't even know what they are missing.

Then they briefly tried to push the one interface for every device holy grail with Windows 8 and UWP. Thankfully that was abortove, but it's still poisoned things more and hurt information density in its fallout.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#94

Post by JohnFen » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:37 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #62

tw04 wrote: post #28

The same people who killed folders "because tags". Don't get me wrong, I love tags, but why on earth can't we have BOTH???? I don't always remember what I tagged something with, and searching through 8 years of work to find something is useless.

Tags would be okay as a folders replacement if they, you know, actually replaced folders. That is: if a tag can in turn have tags, and those tags automatically apply to the tagged files, then it should be trivial to not only emulate a folder hierarchy, but even improve upon it by offering more flexibility. It'd also help substantially if more tag-centric applications were up-front about which tags are already defined…

Agree, but I would add that another advantage of folders over tags is that folders are more discoverable.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#95

Post by robertoandred » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:37 PM UTC

cinnamonheart wrote: post #67

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.

> 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. If I'm resorting to extensions or CSS to modify DOM elements, it's likely the web experience is already broken from my point of view. It's not something I do just for the fun of it.

It's nothing to do with the web experience. Turn on your operating system's scrollbars.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#96

Post by buboard » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #66

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…

Yeah, I always use desktop old reddit on my phone... I like small text I zoom in on. What I hate even worse though is endless scroll... give me damn pagination with buttons! So I can reload the page and not worry about losing my spot, or accidentally scrolling away... let me use the back button on my browser!

oh yeah. i get that with twitter. view a video, close it and you ve lost your page . i dont know why this even happens but it s more annoying than i could ever imagine. My solution is to switch to chronological-view-only, so at least i can tell whether i ve seen my whole feed

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#97

Post by joshstrange » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #88

joshstrange wrote: post #13

I actually prefer the current scollbar situation. I HATE when people hijack it but I prefer it to disappear when I don't need it. I can always scroll a tiny amount (magic mouse) to see my progress. I really do like the clearer look to UI's without the bar. > No flipping clue how long the flipping post flipping is. > No flipping way to quickly navigate to the top or bottom of the post. I've literally never had either…

> I prefer it to disappear when I don't need it. My strong preference is the exact opposite of this. I want it to be there, full size, any time that scrolling is possible. It seems that this is something that should be user configurable.

I can't help you on mobile but this is user configurable on macOS: https://imgur.com/kXDDjnF

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#98

Post by gnode » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

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.

The screen real estate isn't particularly precious on a desktop / laptop with a large, high-resolution screen (much less precious than mobile, for sure), but I also like to get rid of menu bars, tool bars, etc. just because they're visual clutter, and like you say, a keyboard makes up for them.

Ironically, I do enable them on my tablet, because I don't always have a keyboard attached to it. Tablets generally have enough space for full menus / toolbars, and lacking a keyboard they're arguably the form factor most in need of them.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#99

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

quelltext wrote: post #21

For fuck's sake, if you need to be swearing (and I don't think it's necessary at all), just use the actual words.

I often do.

I've been (occasionally) experimenting with slight bowderilisation. For better or worse, less swearing tends to go over slightly better. I can assure you the feeling was there in the original.

My general administrative announcement (NSFW langauge):

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/dlz9c2z6x-tvkd7rxtxwpw

https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/100521241625879766

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#100

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

mthoms wrote: post #85

RaiseProfits wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err isn’t this a problem remembering your file hierarchy as well? Search is the answer in both scenarios.

Well no, the point of a file hierarchy is that it should be well, a hierarchy. In other words each level should sub-divide your files into further obvious (whatever that means to you) subcategories.

Sure, but that doesn’t explain how you magically remember where you stored the file. I suppose it does help with making you unable to store files in the root directory and forcing you to store it somewhere with some meaning. This seems like it would just resolve into a documents directory and you’re back where you started with a flat bag of files that you need to organize arbitrarily.

Also, you can use hierarchies with tags too, it’s just a matter of interface. Example: click “photos”, and see all the other tags that are associated with photos, and in a separate view all the files with all the previously clicked tags. You can drill down this way. Order top level tags by number of files using it. I have never seen this implemented but it seems like it would be fun. I also imagine “photos” itself would be a special file type metadata tag.

EDIT: posted before fleshing out idea, it is fleshed out now.