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.
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.
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."
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.
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 also like using the size of the scrollbar to figure out how much content a document has at a glance.
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.
This of course shows the problem with gesture based UI in general: lack of discoverability.
I don't know.
A lot?
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.