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Comment by eykanal | Hacker News Reader

To all of those complaining that "side scrolling is a bad idea": This is a red herring. The chief complaint here is that Apple made a single gesture which in the past caused a single action (scroll to the left) and made it modal, such that it means "scroll left" UNLESS (1) the user is in Safari and (2) there is no more content to the left, in which case it means "go back".

This is an excellent complaint, and it has been raised before by users (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3192014?start=0&tst...) and bloggers (http://www.tuaw.com/2011/08/02/baffling-inconsistencies-in-o...). It's a UI inconsistency which makes no sense, is confusing for users trying to scroll, and causes problems for developers.

Regarding reverting it, the following Stack Overflow question and answer seems to have found a solution via a github plugin:

http://stackoverflow.com/q/8737709/168775

I have no idea if it works. Good luck!

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The problem isn't apple or safari. Chrome copied a safari feature poorly, THAT is the problem.

I dont' think thats correct. This occurs in Firefox as well.

Then Firefox also copied poorly (wouldn’t surprise me).

It’s a bug in Firefox and Chrome, nothing else.

I've checked in Firefox 9 and Chrome 16.

Chrome is terrible compared to safari - the notification to the user is a very small barely visible arrow that gains visibility as the user scrolls further sideways.

Firefox is terrible compared to chrome, it just happens.

So as I said - Safari does something great, others copy it poorly, and "Lion breaks the web".

If it happens in ff the same as its reported to work in chrome, then they're both at fault.

Safaris implementation makes it very clear you are going to navigate back a page, and it's very easy for the user to cancel the action.

And yet the Chrome version lets you block the action, while with Safari you can't do anything about it...

You don't need to "do anything about it" in safari, as it works properly.

Yes, Chrome's implementation is extremely buggy and is triggered by all sorts of small movements, in addition to providing terrible clues to the user about what is going on.

Safari's implementation is much less painful, is only triggered when I really want it, and provides sufficient visual clues about what's going on.

Chrome's blunder is almost enough for me to switch to Safari, which is saying a lot given my preference for Chrome otherwise.

I use Safari for this reason, and because it took forever for Google to get out a version that wasn't mostly broken on Lion.

I quite like Safari myself, save for the visible tab limit (8 or 9 on my monitor, and have to use the drop down on right hand side to get to other tabs; what year is this?!) and no favicons. Do you or anyone else happen to know of any remedies for those?

A suite of Safari extensions/hacks known as Glims[1] adds favicons to tabs among other things, not sure about allowing more than 8 or 9 tabs though.

[1]: http://machangout.com/

I use chrome, and I haven't noticed a problem. Is the issue just than it scrolls back too fast, or won't allow horizontal scrolling period?

I turned it off because it was too annoying, but what it was doing at the time was

* I'd scroll something horizontally,

* I'd reach the edge of the page

* Chrome would render the "I'm about to go back a page" arrow

* Nothing I tried would cancel the "Back" action

Indeed; I've never really had an issue with this in Safari, but Chrome's version is very easy to trigger.

It's really bad for something like phpMyAdmin that does a lot of things through POST and doesn't support the back button especially well. Accidently triggering back button can wipe out the query you have made.

PHP has been a leader in breaking the web for much longer than Apple or Google.

Overuse of POST should help, though, as it lets the browser jump in to rescue you with a popup before you go Back.

Gooogle has a broad-based commitment to breaking scrolling, from scroll bar width hacking to having multiple scrollable regions in a web page with invisible separators, to hiding and reflowing page content to cut off everything off-window. Chrome integrates with Google's web apps, to the point that you never know how to navigate a page if you use a gapped in Chrome.

Yes, the author of that post wrote the GitHub plugin you're referring to.

https://github.com/micho/jQuery.preventMacBackScroll

Heh, well, good for him, and I hope someone finds a way to get it to work in Safari as well.

Update (I'm the author). This is the feature I finally implemented: https://gist.github.com/1733598

It listens to see if the user scrolled recently and navigated away without clicking, and then explains her what happened and how to avoid it next time. You can dismiss that message if you like Mac's behavior, or you now know how to disable it. Easy peasy.

So maybe you should update your blog with the fact that this is NOT a case of "Lion breaks the web" but in fact a case of "Chrome and Firefox break the web because they can't /copy/ a feature without stuffing it up"

froth much?

The author claims "Lion breaks the web". This is false, and the majority of people commenting seem to simply ignore that the problem he sees is caused by third party browsers that attempt to copy a feature in the included browser, but fail to implement the usability/UX part correctly, thus causing the issue.

How is highlighting that "froth"?

Actually, the "back" or "forward" (aka previous page, next page) behavior is controlled by a system preference for trackpads, and you can easily turn it off.

This seems like such a bad UI Choice by Apple. 1 finger scroll. 2 fingers, in-app action(forward/back), 3 fingers inter-app action, 4 fingers desktop action.

I think differently if I'm looking at a page vs, navigating, and I continue to fail to use scroll-to-navigate. If 2 fingers did forward back I would love it. The current method overloads an abstraction to the point I can't trust it.

The fact that chrome and firefox duplicated it is disappointing.

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