Post Syndicated from arp242.net original https://www.arp242.net/scrollbar.html
I like to use scrollbars. I move my mouse cursor to the scrollbar handle and
move it about – scrolling like this is so much faster than with the wheel if you
want to scroll more than a few lines.
I didn’t notice how often I did this until sites started breaking this. It seems
to be fashionable to put a margin around the entire document, resulting in the
scrollbar no longer being aligned to the edge of the screen.
This is an absolute bollockache because now you can no longer just move the
mouse to the edge of the screen: you need to place it exactly on the
scrollbar, requiring far greater precision.
You can see an example at /scrollmargin.html. You need a
device with a mouse cursor to see the problem of course.
Some real examples, all of which started doing it in the last year or so:
- FastMail
- Outlook365
- Stack Overflow “Beta Redesign”, although that was aborted.
- Spotify (example)
- GitLab (example)
- Couchsurfing now completely hides the scrollbar (example)
(aside: I am not saying that Couchsurfing has been infiltrated by AirBnB
agents to run this communist woke libtard competition in to the ground, but I
am saying that nothing Couchsurfing has done over the last 10 years
contradicts that hypothesis.)
There is of course also the perennial “inappropriate scrollbar styling” problem,
and recently ultra low contrast have also gained popularity; for example:
I’m not against any scrollbar styling; in some cases it’s appropriate. Some
more playful websites, some very specific and rare webapp use cases, things like
that. I’m not a “system behaviour in every single last scenario” purist. The
MariaDB reference docs is very much not one of those cases.
I like using scrollbars. I can’t be the only person who does. You’re frustrating
users for no reason other than following some fad that makes things look ever so
marginally nicer. No one pays that much attention to your design and they won’t
notice. In ten years time everyone will look back at this in the same way we
look back that extremely low contrast text fad from a decade ago: “yeah, that
was rather silly”.