What is the use case for scroll bars, now that we have mouse wheels? Progress indication? My view is that content is king and any UI element that needlessly takes away space from the content needs to be destroyed.
Here are others:
-Discoverability: Is there more content? (Scrollbar enabled/disabled) How much? (Size of scrollbar)
-Jumping to a location in the content
-Skimming by hyperfast scrolling
-Coasting by holding a scroll button pressed (this one is forever lost because the buttons have been abolished
-Providing a space for bookmark indicators/in-page search result indicators
There are probably other use cases too.
2. Size of elevator in relation to the scrollbar tells me what percentage of the content is viewable (except when the size of the elevator becomes so small it makes it unusable).
3. Up and down buttons allow a simple way to bring the next or previous item into view.
A lot of the hate of scrollbars comes from the web, where browser scrollbars could not be styled and didn't necessarily use the operating system's style. You could have a beautiful page be ruined by the default windows 3.11 style scrollbars in the browser.
0. The existence of a scrollbar tells you there's something to be scrolled.
Flat UIs are pretty good at accidentally hiding the fact that not all of the content fits on screen on in whatever borderless frame.
Also fun when websites that are waging their holy war against the bars don't anticipate that I'm zoomed in a bit. Having to delve into devtools to disable "overflow: hidden" is a delight.
There’s about a million different secret handshakes and gestures in iOS UI, but I consider the most egregious UI failure to be the “Share” button, which manages to pop up a modal in such a way that it often disguises both that it can be be scrolled vertically AND that it can be scrolled horizontally.
In case it isn’t, scroll bars are for quickly figuring out the scope, for quick positioning and for remembering where in the article things are.
* Horizontal scrolling
* Scrolling when using pen/touch input on non-touch UIs
* Making it obvious that a content area is scrollable
* Providing context into how much content is visible vs. hidden, and where you are in the document
* Making it easy to scroll to a precise location without sitting there twiddling the wheel for minutes to go through something long
> My view is that content is king and any UI element that needlessly takes away space from the content needs to be destroyed.
Your view makes sense at 640x480. Maybe on a mobile screen. On a widescreen computer display, there's plenty of space for elegant UI controls.
Content is king, but kings have all sorts of people supporting them. In fact you can immediately tell who's the king not by how solitary and unencumbered he is but by how much clutter and commotion and how many attendants are around him. I realize I'm pushing the analogy too far.