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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> An egregious and nearly unbelievable oversight on Google's part. :-\

I agree it's egregious, but it's quite easy to believe.

It's surely just using a standard modal and passing a string. The thing is, this is on a Mac that has scroll bars that are invisible until you scroll. It's easy to imagine testing was done other OS's where the scroll bars are obvious and the bottom line might be only partially hidden which makes it even clearer. And/or that testers never caught it on a Mac because they themselves never realized there were more.

I would hope somebody sees this now and prioritzes a Chromium bug for it. Because on a Mac at least, this is pretty serious.

(And I'm well aware this is a good example of a negative side effect of Apple's choice to make scroll bars visible by default only while scrolling.)

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> I would hope somebody sees this now and prioritzes a Chromium bug for it.

Rather, one would hope that Apple sees it realizes that their short-sighted, bone-headed, pea-brained idea to eliminate scroll bars should be rolled back. Of course, I'm not holding my breath. Yet another example of their crusade to prioritize form over function, exemplifying why I find their products to be infuriating to deal with.

> chrome extensions have horrible flaws and browsers are fundamentally broken

> apple sucks and is the reason for all evil because scroll bars

we dont have scroll bars on mobile as in days of yore. maybe browsers need to finish playing catchup to the threat and interaction models. having a vm on your machine with access to everything you do without sandbox is pretty bad

Hiding scrollbars has been obviously bad UX since day one and this has only become more obvious over time. It doesn't matter whether you're doing it in a web browser or not, whataboutism isn't an appropriate response

the fact that the browser extension can have access to shared memory is the root problem though x)

> Rather

The air travel industry uses the Swiss cheese security model.

EVERYONE does what they can to improve security. The equivalent would be both Google and Apple making improvements.

Both of the problems might be leveraged in a future attack. Fix along the whole chain of events, not just break it - defense in depth.

Having less visual clutter -is- function to me. I really don’t miss permanent scroll bars and hope they don’t bring them back.

Most Macs ship with a trackpad, which means I can’t remember when I last deliberately gripped a scroll bar. They are just a waste of space most of the time, even as an affordance/reminder that scrolling is possible.

I hardly use the scrollbar either (even when using a mouse), but the scrollbar is an important visual clue what portion of a scrollable page is currently being shown, no matter what the input method is. Apple could just have turned the interactive scrollbar into a much slimmer non-interactive hint and all would be fine, but no, they had to go "form over function" again :/

I see your point, but I still think this is a matter of preference and priorities.

I stand by the original argument that for most people, a minor twitch of their fingers on the trackpad reveals this information if they want it. I very rarely do want this though, and on average I prefer that it's not shown by default, or until I move.

This discussion was prompted by a UI fail in presenting relevant security information. Relying on permanent scroll bars would still be a UX fail, even if it were the default on Macs.

Wouldn't it be cool if apple had some kind of menu called like "display settings" or something, and in that menu there was like a checkbox labeled "use invisible scrollbars", and when the checkbox was checked, scrollbars would be invisible, then when it was unchecked, and I know this'll sound crazy, the scollbars would be visible, and people could just make it look the way they like?

Exactly. So much is broken because of misunderstood UX design.

Today I was again reminded that many years ago some UX designer thought it would be a great idea to remove back/forward buttons from the context menu in Firefox if I accidentally select some text on a page I visit.

No one was asked and when someone filed a bug it was ignored because ux designers had already decided.

Result:

- a few times every month back/ forward buttons are missing

- the look and feel of the context menu changes for no good reason

If I understand you correctly, then I asked for this. Text is often selected by accident, so the top item in the menu would go Back instead of Open in new tab, as that is in the same place in the context menu. The opposite of what I want, and infuriating to use.

https://superuser.com/questions/1074338/disable-back-in-chro...

i'm reminded of this every day. I hate it so much.

It was reported a decade ago.

But we are only "users", even if each if us converted 10 or more IE6 users and bothered IT departments to allow Firefox, web sites to write for web standards and not IE etc etc.

When they ask for money, we are "valued community members". When we have a question we are just annoying "users" it seems.

And the worst part: if you donate to Mozilla it doesn't go to Firefox. It goes to some other project.

Because Firefox is a profit center for Mozilla and they are milking it dry year after year and our donations comes on top of that.

Still I use Firefox. It is still better for my purposes (large hierarchies of related pages that lives from hours to weeks).

And it is not like using Google Chrome would improve the situation.

But lately (maybe the last twelve months?) I have started to use LibreWolf too. I use it as my research browser while using Firefox for all logged in work. It feels good, like using Firefox back in the days.

And if I can work against both Mozilla and Google simultaneously, maybe I should cut Firefox completely :-]

Can’t even tell if this is satire, but yes, there happens to be such a setting, System Preferences -> Appearance -> Show scroll bars, with options “automatically based on mouse or trackpad”, “when scrolling”, and “always”. It’s been there since forever. Of course that’s not going to assuage the wrath of non-Apple users like kibwen. Don’t use it if you don’t like it, ffs. As for me, I’m happy to do without bars everywhere.

No surprise that the person overreacting about an Apple design decision ends their comment with “yeah and just don’t like them anyway!”

Critiques of Apple from people that have this sort of wide-ranging vitriolic hate for Apple are a dime a dozen, and don’t make for any sort of interesting or enjoyable conversation.

> nearly unbelievable

I don't get why people say something like this, especially on HN where lots of people are SDE themselves.

Every single feature is hand-crafted by a/some real person(s), and is usually only reviewed by a handful people. It only makes sense sometimes it has serious oversight.

It's true. However, the orgs in question have billions of money. They can afford more than a handful of people to address these things.

Eight person startup? Sure. But not these folk who "only hire the best"

But the more people you hire, the more bugs there are to address!

What you are proposing is adding bureaucracy and red tape. The government has billions of money and they can afford many people doing various checks and compliance work; do you want to work for the government?

> The thing is, this is on a Mac that has scroll bars that are invisible until you scroll.

I try to live with the defaults as it makes switching machines so much less painful, however turning scroll bars in is an absolute requirement for sane usage. At least you don’t have to do it in Terminal anymore.

Edit: I can’t find any evidence that the preference could only be toggled via Terminal in some macOS versions. I’m thought that around version 10.6 this was the case, but maybe I’m wrong?

Fortunately, you can override Apple's choice:

Settings > Appearance > Scroll bar behavior > Show scroll bars > Always

If I were in charge of fixing this bug for Chromium, I might start by prioritizing which permissions are the most nefarious, list them first, perhaps in red. Then ensure the entire dialog expands vertically to fit as much content as possible.

I wondered about this. I would sincerely hope that the permissions list is already priority-sorted somehow; otherwise, it’d be trivial to just list five innocuous permissions first and then put the dangerous ones later. Even with scrollbars, most users would just see the first few and likely not bother to scroll down at all. Note that in the author’s post, one of the dangerous permissions (read and modify data for all websites) is already listed in the box.

Have users view and approve each permission individually. First permission is listed, buttons for "deny" and "approve", user clicks "approve", next permission is listed, etc. Clicking stuff is a lot of work for users and some of those permissions sound pretty intimidating, so I suspect either extensions would start getting by using fewer permissions or users would start getting by using fewer extensions.

Either of those outcomes would be a win for security and privacy.

Users _should_ understand what an extension having access to this stuff implies, and if that means they only use "official" extensions or stop using them that's fine.

Also "clicking stuff is a lot of work for users" made me laugh a little. How many damn cookie consent buttons do users have to click every day? An extension should be orders of magnitude more "work" to allow than that.

> on a Mac that has scroll bars that are invisible until you scroll

this has got to be one of the worst UX decisions of the past 10 years, come at me. You can just hear the meeting discussion:

A: make the scrollbars invisible until you scroll, that nets us 4% more width!

B: but it reduces discoverability by 50%, and its also an attack vector...

C: ship it!

I love this feature, scroll bars are mostly useless, the position indicator should be decoupled and doesn't need to have extra width (can be a mark on the window border), and the security issues are solved by a summary at the top of the list, not a generic scrollbar

I dislike the invisible scroll bars, but I don’t think they’re about width, I think they’re about visual clutter. Apple likes simplicity (yes yes you can find examples where they failed) and this seems to be in keeping with simple design.

Still a bad idea though.

> The thing is, this is on a Mac that has scroll bars that are invisible until you scroll.

Undoubtedly the stupidest UI decision made in the last 20 years.

>this is on a Mac that has scroll bars that are invisible until you scroll.

What modern UI even has visible scroll bars by default?

And assuming it's even visible (either by default or user-configured after the fact if that's even possible), what modern UI even has scroll bars wider than 1px?

74% of all users? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

> What modern UI even has visible scroll bars by default?

Pretty much all of them except Mac.

Can speak personally for KDE, Sway, GNOME, and Windows 10.

And when they are invisible, they usually show up on mouse motion/window interaction, so it's still not as egregious.

Xfce4.18 (GTK) has them. Has for 15+ years.

Shout out to Xfce for being so boring/consistent for more than a decade.

I'm so grateful for Xfce, it's been my desktop for maybe 15 years. Such a godsend in a world where every other UI gets more bloated and less usable over time.

> Pretty much all of them except Mac.

iOS is way more prevalent and has hidden scroll bars unless scrolling. Thanks Apple.

I'm using Firefox 110, Gnome, Wayland, Pop!_OS 22.04. I only have a scrollbar when I scroll or mouse-over the scroll bar.

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