The Death of the Scrollbar | Hacker News Reader

The Death of the Scrollbar

gigaom.com

34 pointsshawndumas46 comments

Am I the only one who sees this as a step backwards in usability? I like having the scrollbar as a visual indication of how far down I've gone in content.

iOS still gives you that indication, at least to an extent. Whenever you scroll an iOS app a little indicator of where the scrollbar would be appears.

Does this mean there's nothing to 'grab' with a mouse and drag to scroll? Surely a step backwards.

In Mac OS X Lion, you can reveal the scrollbar by mousing over to the right gutter area, and you can drag it as you would a normal scrollbar. There is also the option to have them always appear. But by Fitt's law that's an exponentially less efficient way to navigate through a document. How many people actually use scrollbars that way?

In what way? Moving their mouse cursor over to it, clicking and dragging?

I don't know.

A lot?

I have seen some non-technical people that use the scrollbar all the time. Some even use those little arrows at the upper and lower ends of the scrollbar.

I guess they were taught that way, and it works for them (for the few times a day they use a computer). And they just don't see the need of learning a new way to move up and down a document.

I'm with you on this one. Fading scroll bars make sense on mobile devices because there is very limited screen real estate; we don't have the same issue on a desktop/laptop.

I also like using the size of the scrollbar to figure out how much content a document has at a glance.

Mac OS X Lion, like iOS, flashes the scroll bars when the view loads, so you have that information from the beginning.

That and the issue of being forced to scroll through a potentially long page to get to the bottom, which is where the information you're actually after is located. Major usability fail.

This is my biggest problem with the iPad Twitter application, which stays at the last point you used it. If that point was two days ago it can take a while to scroll through the backlog to get to now.

It does seem easily solvable though, either with a "jump to now" button, or maybe a two finger flick taking you to the top of a list.

Just tap the very top of the screen. That takes you back to the top.

This of course shows the problem with gesture based UI in general: lack of discoverability.

No. With the keyboard, use the End key. With the mouse or trackpad, flick up quickly. Exponentially more efficient than dragging a scrollbar or clicking at the end of the scroll gutter.

One of my biggest pet peeves with webOS - no scroll bar or indicator

B-but it's so shiney and modern!

No, it's less shiny than the predecessor, which was actually graphically "shiny," in that it's a flat gray and only rarely appears.

Not just that - the scrollbar also lets you scroll at any speed you want (just grab and drag), and lets you instantly jump to an arbitrary point in the document you are looking at. "Shuffling" through content is nice if you are reading top to bottom, but it's hard to beat a scrollbar if you're jumping around.

> the scrollbar also lets you scroll at any speed you want (just grab and drag)

Just one point on this, you possibly know this but scrolling accelerates on iOS, so the more you flick the faster it seems to go, I'm not sure if it works this way in Lion or not. Admittedly it's not as precise, but does mean going from top->bottom isn't as infuriatingly slow as one might imagine.

The acceleration is present in Lion and it's more sensitive than in iOS, so you can get through about 5 window heights with a fast flick or go pixel by pixel if you move slow enough. Also if you flick again before the inertia has died down, the acceleration seems to build up, so 3 quick flicks might get you through 20 screens of content. Pretty cool really.

And don't forget an immediate visual indicator of the total length of the document.

I feel like scroll bars have really matured to the point of being almost perfect. The only things I can think of to really change (looking at the scroll bars on this window right now) are: 1. disappear when content fits in the window instead of grayed out scroll bars; and 2. Get rid of the vestigial up and down arrow buttons.

Last time I saw something really horrible done with scroll bars was in Google Wave. What a disaster.

Here I feel like Apple seems to be having issues because they're trying to form a consistency between iOS and OSX, but there's an inherent tension in that iOS is a direct manipulation metaphor, and OSX can't really be.

It goes both ways. On iOS, they're running out of input bandwidth that's strictly metaphorical, so they're now resorting to gestures, which are out of metaphor and not discoverable.

On OSX Lion, scrolling is immediately inconsistent with iOS, because, of course, it's not a direct manipulation metaphor, so there's already an extra level of abstraction, and you scroll with two fingers instead of with one. Because of that level of abstraction, the direction is basically arbitrary, though I suppose it makes it slightly more consistent with iOS, in that you're (in a +1 remove) pulling on the content like in iOS, instead of pulling on the scroll bar.

But not showing the scroll bar by default is especially weird to me, in that the constraint for iOS--screen real estate--doesn't really exist on a desktop environment. Why not provide that information, then? Consistency over usability is my guess.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

2. Get rid of the vestigial up and down arrow buttons.

I like having those buttons. I think it was a step backwards when Chrome for Linux abandoned them. Those buttons don't take up much space, and they're convenient for when you have to scroll a little bit in a long document.

Interesting, I really didn't think anyone used them anymore.

Just curious: do you not have a scroll wheel? I just tested, and it scrolls the same amount (WinXP (work)). The arrow keys on the keyboard also scroll the same amount.

I use the scroll wheel at home, but at work, the scroll wheel is worn down on my mouse, so often it'll skip and scroll 2 or more increments when I only want it to scroll once. As for arrow keys, well, my hand is on the mouse anyway and I'd rather keep it there than scroll on the keyboard and go back to the mouse.

So it sounds like you use it as a last resort because of a broken scroll wheel. Isn't that an edge case?

Sort of, but I know plenty of less-experienced computer users who still use the buttons. Older people, especially, may not have the finger dexterity to manipulate the scrollwheel with the necessary precision.

It's Apple. They don't give a fuck about usability as long as their UI is different from that of Windows.

I can't remember when I actually used a scrollbar for scrolling. I instead scroll with two fingers on the trackpad, or with arrow keys.

So for me traditional scrollbars are a waste of space. But I still like to have an indication of where I am in the document, which is what almost every mobile platform out there does.

Here is an example how they redid scrollbars in latest Ubuntu: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/615

I use the scroll bar all the time when I don't have my mouse.

How do you use a scrollbar without a mouse?

I use a trackpad and button to drag up and down on the scroll bar. I don't think the scroll on the trackpad is precise enough.

It's totally weird that I didn't even register the two devices as different hardware classes.

I can imagine instances where scrolling on a trackpad is more precise (webpages) and less precise (Photoshop?), but in reality, since the move to multitouch trackpads, two-finger scrolling has almost always felt significantly faster and more accurate.

I also use the three-finger swipe on scrollbars, regularly. Not all windows scroll properly. Still, the notion of clicking and dragging to scroll is really odd now.

On a Mac? Trackpad scrolling on all Windows laptops I tried always annoyed me but I never had any problems with two-finger-scrolling. It's nearly as precise as moving the mouse pointer. (The only problem is that you have two fingers on the trackpad, but Mac trackpads are not as tiny as so many PC counterparts.)

I always prefered page up/down and arrow keys to manipulate content long before I knew I was manipulating the content. Mousing is just to inefficient in most cases.

Now that you say that I just realised I use my arrow keys and pgup and pgdown keys a lot! I didn't think of them when I commented.

It's important to note that latest Ubuntu has completely fucked up the scrollbars. It would be nice if all apps actually used the new scrollbars, but only some of them do. Notable lacking the new scrollbars are such rarely used applications as Firefox and gnome-terminal.

Mac OS X Lion also has the option to revert the scrolling direction to the old behavior.

Bold of them to reverse the scrolling gesture in Lion. Not sure I'd like that.

I don't think it's just a matter of habituation. It seems like it's physically easier to pull my fingers toward me on the trackpad, than to push them away.

Once something reaches a level of maturity that approximates perfection, any significant changes to it will clearly make the thing worse. This isn't a problem if you have the discipline to simply not make changes, but unfortunately this is what GUI designers are paid to do (and it's also more fun than being a maintenance programmer).

You seem to be implying that modern GUIs have reached a level of maturity that approximates perfection. I really think that's a bit of a stretch.

Why would there be so much effort among technical people to avoid using GUIs, either by using programs that run in a terminal or by memorizing hotkeys, if our current GUIs are perfect for the tasks we want them to perform? I doubt you'd get non-technical people to agree that today's GUIs are perfect, either; in my experience, they find them frustrating at best.

So does this mean that you will not be able to use a regular mouse with Lion? I guess a Mighty Mouse will work but what about people who want to use 3rd party mice with multiple buttons? Gamers and designer are SOL?

How is this the case? How many 3rd-party mice don't have a scrollwheel? (Especially gaming mice!)

The other question is "What is the default behavior?". If I plug a mouse without a scrollwheel into my iMac, do scrollbars show up by default? It seems a sensible way for them to handle that case, but we'll see.

There is the option to base scroll bar appearance on your input device.

No.

I programmed industrial touchscreens a long time ago (my first job) and implemented scrolling more-or-less like that. Not really a big deal.

http://blog.pilotmoon.com/post/4041089648/scroll-reverser-ge...

you can get in practice for this with this little program for snow leopard

I used it in my browser if I have to scroll a loooong way. Can't think of an easier way to do that.

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