Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?
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Also, it's not only Apple that seems to hate the scrollbar nowadays. I'm seeing lots of apps (especially electron apps) that don't show a scrollbar until you mouse over it, and what's worse is that there are often multiple scrollbars for different screen areas/frames, but it's not entirely obvious which is which, and you have to do mouse-overs for them to even appear.
I resent designers for messing up user experience, pushing the industry away from good solutions that were discovered and implemented decades ago.
There were many, MANY extremely intelligent and highly technical people who got into very long flame wars when the feature of displaying the X and Y coordinates of the center of a window and the corners whenever it was moved, was removed.
And now it seems silly.
What use case is there? Knowing all of the time how much of a webpage is left below the bottom of a window? That is not relevant information to most people and becomes immediately available as soon as you move your fingers 1mm to scroll through the contents of a window.
Quickly jumping position in a long window? Normal users don't care and power users use HOME, END, PGUP, PGDOWN or other keyboard shortcuts because it is very highly unlikely that you know the exact percentage of a window you need to scroll through and the time taken removing your hands from the keyboard exceeds the time saved by knowing that direct percentage anyways.
I have a Model M and fancy-pants trackball but the vast, overwhelming majority of users are interacting with their computers using a touchpad or their fingers. To the point that mouse users should be deprioritized to enhance the experience of the majority.
Removing persistent scrollbars puts the needs of the many ahead of the few.... or the one.
At my work, we recently had a bug filed where a lot of users were reporting that one of the pages didn't have all the controls it ought to. It turned out that those users needed to scroll down to get to those controls, but they didn't realize they could scroll. At the common viewport size they were using, the page looked complete. It didn't look like there was anything to scroll.
If there was a persistent scrollbar, the user could have easily seen that there was more content to scroll to.
Now, you could say that the design of that page was bad if users had to scroll to important controls, and you might have a good case. In this case, the controls weren't the most important part of the page, and modern design favors decreasing density. There are always going to be cases where users aren't going to realize they can scroll.
Windows phone tried to solve this is in the most disorienting way possible by making sure things were always getting cut off on the sides that you could scroll, but other than that blip in history, there's been no standard replacement for the scrollbar for informing users they can scroll.
I need to scroll the damn thing. Not with the mouse scroll ( too rough) not with the keyboard ( i don't want to lose keyboard focus from the current element). I just need to scroll. I don't have time to wait until the scrollbar appears, i don't want to click for it to appear. I just want it there.
If I don't see a scrollbar I don't scroll down. A scrollbar indicates that there is content below the fold.
This seems like a “designer run amok” kind of thing. Someone with power decided it was “clutter” and you don’t really need it except when scrolling so they removed it despite all the very real downsides.
I keep hoping they’ll go back (like natural scrolling) but I realize that’s unlikely.
Even big, 'reputable' companies do this.
In some cases removing the bar made sense. Now it's just fancy copy/paste where it does not apply and the bar would have been useful.
But like you've alluded to, for every good example of brutalism, there are terrible ones.
Actually not; I first saw a scrollbar on an Alto in the late 70s. Computing had been around for three decades at that point.
Not that I like the scrollbar. The Apple ones appeal to me because 1 - they are only there when I want one (which is almost never) and 2 - even then they are quite small.
Even if you like the scrollbar, this mechanism seems like it would be good when you can scroll different parts of the display, parts that may not even be delineated by a box.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...
Agreed for full size desktop/ non-touchscreen devices there's no good reason to hide it, and worse I've had occasions where I literally couldn't find functionality because I had no idea a menu was scrollable.
B) Despite your cheery tone that IS an option you can turn on when you fullscreen safari and Chrome, and I do in fact use it. It’s great. The whole screen is just the web page you’re on.
You mean those wide-load, content dense websites like this? https://imgur.com/a/6pQAXWP
BTW the only site I know what supports wide-load toggle is https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/UNIX
And F11 still works.
Seems silly. All you have to do is start scrolling and you immediately see the scrollbar.
E.g. "The first and basic thing is it allows you to grab the scroll bar and move down the page quickly. You don't have to double finger scroll over and over to get to the bottom of a very long page. You can simply drag and pull it to your desired location."
You know what? if you move your mouse all the way to the right to scroll with the bar you can also scroll for a fraction of a second to reveal it so you can grab it.
But if isn't clear that you have reached the bottom of a website, then that's a problem with the page.
It's especially bad with flat UI design, to the point of being a dark pattern: in the Windows 10 and 11 setup process, there's a screen for opting out of various privacy invasions and other anti-features. Several of the options are completely invisible and undiscoverable until you start turning off the ones that are on screen, changing how tall those options are and revealing that the list is scrollable. Abuse like that is reason enough to always mistrust and hate auto-hiding scrollbars.
I'm not sure which version of Windows you think predated scroll bars, but I'm pretty sure it didn't have any telemetry reporting back to Microsoft over the internet.
Do you think having visible scroll-bars does anything if Microsoft just re-enables those settings when you update windows?
That's another matter entirely. Microsoft's current strategy is to give at least some appearance of getting informed consent for those anti-features. Silently re-enabling them during an update without asking the user would be much more likely to get them in trouble.
As for not knowing about it being scrollable, apple explicitly addresses it in their design guidelines: https://developers.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelin...
“Make it apparent when content is scrollable. Because scroll bars aren’t always visible, it can be helpful to make it obvious when content extends beyond the view. For example, displaying partial content at the edge of a view indicates that there’s more content in that direction. Although most people immediately try scrolling a view to discover if additional content is available, it’s considerate to draw their attention to it.”
That's why so many websites have pointless scroll arrows inviting you to scroll.
But not knowing if you can scroll is caused by poor website design and not by a hidden scrollbar
Being fooled into believing there's no more content is often incidental: some gap in the content aligns perfectly with the bottom of the window. (This is especially the case with designer websites which use a lot of blank spaces.) You shouldn't need a custom solution.
As for the rest of your comment. This really is a matter of preference. You’ve built a habit to look at the scroll bar. I’ve built a habit to try scrolling and see what happens.
That being said I would love if it was easier to add an overflow indicator using just CSS for situations where it is less apparent that a sub-element of a page can scroll.
But I badly want it as an indicator. More than once, using macOS or mobile OSes I could not realize that an area contains much more items than meets the eye, because nothing suggested that I should scroll.
This, of course, is due to the general tendency of throwing UI discoverability under the bus of "clean looks".
They had scrollbars in the fifties?
You might as well argue that it is not necessary to have the status bar always visible, or any other type of indicator.
I also don’t buy the “crowded” argument, because scrollbars were perfectly fine when we only had 14" monitors with 1024x768 resolution.