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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

> I have a really hard time believing anyone would chose this as opposed to some design lead at Apple pushing a weird personal preference for tidyness on their entire user base

I strongly prefer the invisible scroll bars in about 95% of cases.

I'm either using a trackpad or a scroll wheel on my trackball. In the former case, it's trivially easy to jog the screen up and down or sideways, to see if there's missing content. In the latter case, yeah, horizontal scrolling is challenging, but I'm going to be on a widescreen monitor, so my response is to fill more of the window with the content (quick shout-out to Moom, which makes this easy).

It very occasionally happens that I won't notice that there's more content available, and scroll bars would help with that. But I'd rather optimize for the usual case, and get the cleaner lines and extra real estate which go with it.

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> In the former case, it's trivially easy to jog the screen up and down or sideways, to see if there's missing content

"I jog my screen around to see if anything moves" is a clear sign of two things:

One, that you're looking to see if there's missing content.

Two, that you do not know if there is missing content.

Missing content should be made evident by a display system designed to make it easy to access content. If your display system is hiding content from you and not showing you this, then is it really doing a good job of helping you access content?

Plus, consider how many users won't do the trivially easy thing. At scale, I would lay good odds that it's a disturbingly high number.

Good luck scrolling to the bottom of a very long page. And then going back up.

You can always click on the scroll bars -- invisible doesn't mean they don't exist, they simply go out of the way when they're not needed (i.e. most of the time / when not scrolling). You can do that on iOS and Android as well, tap and hold on the scroll bar to quickly scroll through an entire document.

I just tried that on Chrome on macOS and it doesn't work

How exactly is that an issue?

This is actually a non-issue (or at least a minor issue for extremely long pages) on a Mac, because macOS has system-wide kinetic scrolling and all Apple input devices use touch sensitive surfaces for scrolling.

Not saying you're wrong, it's certainly annoying on mobile devices (compounded by the narrow screens and responsive content).

I use a macbook pro and this is an issue for me quite often, maybe you'll be faster but it'll still be a hassle

It's trivially easy. Just put your mouse at the edge and move the scroll wheel. You can then click it. There is also an option in System Preferences to change this behavior and always show the scroll bars. Since this motion is more intuitive on a trackpad than on a mouse, scrollbars always show when using a mouse by default.

https://i.imgur.com/LTg81eW.png

Ah you're right, just yesterday I sprained my pinky hitting command-up and command-down!

You got me on that one!

haven't seen these keys on a keyboard in like 10 years o_O

If your keyboard doesn't have a way to send Home and End then it's broken.

Scroll has acceleration on macOS touchpads, doing it with two fingers is just as fast if not faster than dragging a scrollbar with the mouse.

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