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Comment by xyzzy_plugh | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I'm the only user on the planet who still uses "click to scroll" regularly. If I'm reading a thousand-page document, navigating by incrementally scrolling up or down is painfully slow, and using home/end key functionality requires reaching for the keyboard (and possibly using keyboard shortcuts on a laptop) and still doesn't allow me to instantly jump to the middle of the page, for example.

The fact that this is also not the OS default (clicking usually _incrementally_ scrolls towards where you click, instead of jumping) is infuriating.

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In Firefox you can ctrl+click or shift+click the scroll track to switch between incremental and absolute scroll behaviour. Maybe not all OSes though.

Not just Firefox, all programs in Windows 10 allow shift+click to jump. The only exceptions are new UWP style scrollbars (the ones that are affected by the "Automatically hide scrollbars in Windows" setting). Fortunately I don't use any of those, other than start menu and settings. Interestingly (as mentioned in the article) EdgeHTML based Edge is not one of them, scrollbar is always visible regardless, and shift+click works.

Besides having to um, drag the mouse, is there an issue with simply dragging the visible scroll thumb/knob/thingy down or up? That said, my preferred way to get to a part of a page is CTRL+F, which really should be updated to automatically OCR images at some point in the future. It's a shame we call sites inaccessible in 2019 when we can sometimes fix such problems automatically. I'm not saying it's a permanent or good fix, but nobody's going to go into web.archive.org to update the alt text that wasn't provided in the first place... there are browser extensions, and JAWS apparently does it, but we shouldn't need to turn to commercial tools, it should be baked into the OS and browsers so it can be used more easily. And for sites that override Ctrl+F, there should be a way to override that in the addressbar as if it's a privacy/security setting, on a per-site basis. Actually, you could add such a setting for scrollbars too, but there should be limits somewhere or the settings list would just become about:config or the Registry. /endrant

> The fact that this is also not the OS default (clicking usually _incrementally_ scrolls towards where you click, instead of jumping) is infuriating.

Why? Incremental scrolling works fine for pages and files of any length, whereas click-and-jump only works well for short pages.

Try to use click-and-jump with a long document, like a book, or a long header file. You move the mouse a few pixels, click and bam it's scrolled 3,000 lines. I'd much rather have to do an extra click when reading a short page than play silly games with the scrollbar on long documents.

I like jump-to-scroll in conjunction with a mouse wheel for page-by-page scrolling. Unfortunately this combo is not as common as you'd expect, since most jump-to-scroll systems are ancient and predate the concept of the scroll wheel. Page up/Page down is an alternative to the scroll wheel, but somewhat less ergonomic when you're already clicking around a document.

At least there are some modern examples that get it right, like Firefox.

Plus, I find it pretty rare that I have a document that compresses the scroll bar that badly.

I'm not trying to argue that people who prefer a particular behaviour are wrong, just to point out why it's a valid technical choice. You may find it pretty rare that you have a document that compresses the scroll bar that badly, but there are billions of computer users in the world. An interface that's usable by everyone may be the proverbial least common denominator, but at least in this case, it is the least dysfunctional.

option+clicking the scrollbar does that. doesn't prevent you from having to reach for the keyboard though..

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