Scrollbars are becoming a problem
Scrollbars are becoming a problem
Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem...
Too narrow, hidden, minimal feedback...
People with dexterity and hand control challenges have a difficult time with these skinny scroll bars.
I have neither dexterity nor hand control challenges and I still find it incredibly hard to grab those skinny scroll bars.
One additional design "feature" I really despise is auto hiding scroll bars. So then to visually see when I am I have to scroll up and down to bring it back.
And web designers that do that stupid scroll hijacking where scrolling "stops" and then things move around for a bit should be launched into the sun. It's the most anti-UX design I've ever seen. It's literally the same as temporarily causing your mouse cursor to move in the opposite direction of input and then calling it a "design feature".
Imagine if each application on your computer arbitrarily changed up the direction your mouse cursor moves. It's literally the same thing. Computer input should be 100% predictable and reliable. The instant you do that it makes the computer/program/website feel sluggish and inoperative.
I call it the "War on Scrollbars" and I think it started when some meme about watching a teacher use a computer got popular. https://old.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/df8cd/watching_someone_use_a_computer/
I absolutely hate how tiny scrollbars have gotten. I hate how clicking in a certain spot cause the scrollbar to move slightly instead of jumping directly to where I click.
These are modern design decisions that I think shitty designers implemented because they need to feel useful. Then, autistic users who want nothing on their screen praise them for it.
It's disgusting and I hope, one day, we can look back on how the 2010s were the worst decade for software design so far.
I love it when scrollbars are like, half an atom wide. Makes it easy to use the website.
I feel you, so I have researched this:
For Firefox you can change the width /style of the scrollbar:
(A) In a new tab, type or paste
about:config
in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.
(B) In the search box in the page, type or paste
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style
(C) Press the Return or Enter key to find the setting. Click the Edit (pencil) button on the right side of the widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style setting.
(D) Delete the current 0 value for the default OS style scrollbar. Then input the value 1 (Mac OS X), 2 (GTX), 3 (Android), 4 (Windows 10), or 5 (Windows 11) in the widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style box for the scrollbar style you want to change to. For example, enter 4 to change the scrollbar to the default Windows 10 design.
(E) Click the Save button on the right side of the widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style setting to apply.
Also for the hiding:
Windows: Settings > Ease of Access > Display > Automatically hide scroll bars in Windows
Mac: System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars
It could be that websites are being made unbearable, to pressure users into switching to the site's mobile apps, which are generally spyware. I can't stand looking at homedepot.com on a phone, for example. Even if I don't look at the screen, I can feel the phone warming up in my hand as the crapware javascript on the site drains the phone battery.
Yeah seriously. Like I am okay with them auto hiding when the mouse is away, but nowadays, even when you're mousing over them, they're only like 3-4px wide. What kind of a mouse target is that?! Ridiculous.
For a while I was playing video games with a mouse that had a broken scroll wheel. Some games just don't even implement a scroll bar at all... So you have to hold down the arrow keys to go through each item. So infuriating.
I like the way GTK is doing it. You have a thin scrollbar that is overlayed over the content and has no background (so just the knob) but when you get near it with the mouse, the background appears and it becomes double as thick. That way you're not wasting any space but you don't have this issue of it being hard to use either.
I've never even used them. I just scrolled with a mouse or the touchpad gesture, and its much more convenient.
Even using pc all day I can't click a scroll bar on the first time!
Customizing the scrollbar on Firefox using CSS is different so many sites don't even bother and keep the default one
Misc. forenote: not sure if true on all systems but on mine, if you right-click on the scroll bar it acts similar to the old scrollbar arrows (in my file manager it's slower, but moving the mouse speeds it up)
My eyesight is not the best (and my screen isn't that big), but I still don't mind it (for example Firefox). I like that it doesn't seem to change content width (even expanded, it's still in the margins with my higher zoom level). Though I could see using a brighter scroll bar, particularly as it gets smaller (also, a darker scrollbar background to increase contrast). Color might help for readability too.
Back when I used Chrome I didn't like the white scrollbar background and light-gray bar that was horrible contrast yet too bright (and in the corner of my eye it didn't register properly due to that). At one point I used an extension to fix that with a thinner-but-high-contrast bar.
Then again, I also made my own ultra-compact window theme for XFCE (well, XFWM). Frameless and the titlebar is 12px tall but the window buttons are only 8px tall... some of the buttons are slightly wider to compensate (minimize and maximize are widest at 20px), though I would ideally like to allow them to be wider with a wider window (with the current setup, a long-titled window will be made shorter if the buttons take up too much space on a small window).
There is some utility for this as well, as I can have a small music player on-screen or even rolled up and it doesn't block much on the screen. Though I admit it's diminishing returns, specifically without making my own WM which I am unlikely to do.
I'll see ones that seem to show up visually but I've never ever been able to click onto it and move it.
The text boxes full of text, with both a horizontal and vertical scroll bar, on a page with a scroll bar. When I use the mouse wheel near the bottom of the text it scrolls right, towards the right it scrolls down, but I actually wanted to scroll the page down.
Not me installing a css snippet in Obsidian to solve this exact problem.
Eh, scrollbars are one of my least favourite UX design choices, though I respect that some people like them and do think that they should be a reasonable size for those who do want them.
There are so many better ways to navigate vertically scaling content now (not least of which, mousewheels). I think they served a good purpose in the early days of document editors and web browsers, but they're a bit of an easy out for poorly laid out content.