I Want My Scrollbar Back | Hacker News Reader

I Want My Scrollbar Back

aartaka.me

95 pointsthunderbong63 comments

I absolute hate the modern UX trends of minimalism and hiding things.

How did we get here? It seems in the late 90s/early 00s, we did tons of usability studies and formed our UIs and UXes around the results. We wanted to appeal to everyone.

And now, we've thrown it all away. Functionality is hidden. Discoverability is considered ugly and cluttered. Usability is thrown out the window in favor of something that looks "sleek" or "clean".

I've personally decided that rejecting a design purely because it's "dated" and not on any technical merits is evidence that you don't know how to think for yourself and just follow trends, whether they're good or bad.

My personal wish is a compromise -- there should be a universal button that we designate as the "SHOW ME WHAT I CAN DO" button.

It would show scrollbars, enumerate every shortcut, hilight everything clickable, indicate everything draggable, indicate everything right-clickable, etc.

Then perhaps an OS-setting to keep it permanently active.

Both Mac and especially newer windows has a huge number of weird hidden shortcut options that I still haven't learned after 5-10 years.

Same with phones, weird things like holding the spacebar on the IOS keyboard to scroll through your prior typed text.

> How did we get here?

I would guess it's an unholy confluence of putting people who prioritize appearance over usability in charge of UI design, plus the diminishing actual returns of computer technology coupled with an incessant pressure to "innovate."

People aren't rational, and the meme "new is improved" helps paper over a lot of dysfunction.

>> How did we get here?

I think it is lazyness. By that I mean these toolkits are so complex, things get dropped because it would probably double development trying to get 5% extra into the product.

> these toolkits are so complex,

They might be at an API level. At GUI level, they are very simple.

Form over function.

Every so often I use some old windows native gui apps and lament how clear the ui is and how fast they run

One of my big surprises when I started in the business world was how many decisions are driven solely by fads and mimickry. It all gets wrapped in a lot of jargon and fancy presentations to make it look like poeple are being thoughtful and sophisticated, but 95% of the time decision makers are just shooting from the hip and latching onto whatever random idea caught their eye somewhere else.

It's discouraging to think about how much time gets wasted on useless or even regressive work. Once I started seeing this everywhere my tolerance for pointless refactors and redesigns went to zero.

That's not to say that changes are always bad, but the burden of proof should be on the side arguing to toss something that works for $ShinyNewThing, but in the tech industry the bias is usually on the opposite side. Newness gets lauded for the sake of being new and objections get stifled by the trend followers saying that you are afraid of change or don't appreciate evolution. No, I've just seen the same hype cycle play out enough times that I'm sick of wasting my time on bullshit.

I worked at an app company where they kept re-designing over and over and over, and it wan't even anything very clever or innovative: It was just "other apps started using these design fads, so we must now use them too". Over and over. We had critical bugs to fix, areas where battery usage and performance were very poor, lots of spaghetti code and things that needed cleanups, but no, where did we invest our effort? UI re-designs.

I remember when "mystery meat navigation" was a phrase and viewed very unfavorably.

From what I heard, this was the reason Apple only shipped their mouse with a single button for so long. They didn't want developers to hide things away in right-click menus; everything should be somewhere else and discoverable by looking at the UI. Shipping with a single button mouse, even when they supported right-click, was a way to force developers not to get lazy with it, since they couldn't count on users having a right-click on their mouse (or knowing control+click was a thing).

Because the younglings graduating UX design want to do it all over again from scratch - but this time without all the old-foggy committee produced HIG standards and more based on looks, feels and jazz.

100% this. These problems were solved in the 90's. The people who solved them moved on to other things, retired, etc.

Designers and PMs don't get promoted for keeping things the same. So they went ahead and broke usability and gave each other high fives for making the UI "modern".

There are many variations of this theme. Look at Google Maps. It was solved a decade ago. Whoever built it has presumably moved on. New people are in charge and they won't get promoted if they leave it untouched. With every change, usability gets worse.

I have to use Windows 10 at work. The flat white UI makes navigating File Explorer excruciating. Borders between panels are nearly invisible, clicking on them means fine mouse control to juuuust hit that one or two pixel trigger point, functions are hidden in ribbon panels, ... the beat goes on. In exchange I get absolutely nothing in terms of capability or performance.

I want my Stop button back.

It was good when you could instantly stop all incoming data from a website with a single click.

And you had a status bar at the bottom of your browser that displayed the source address of each piece of data as it was coming in.

You could always refresh later if you thought you were missing something.

So much garbage is now unstoppable.

same.

for a while i feel like chrome developer console had the ability to pause (and step thru) js.

i don't see that button anymore... am i crazy? did that ever exist?

You still can. I did it just now with this text field form. Hit pause, and then the next event (focusing the text field) caused it to break.

it's undermined by `debugger` statements these days designed to make it difficult to inspect page content

How does that work? I'm not familiar.

Not seen that one before, but a smart trick.

"The debugger statement invokes any available debugging functionality, such as setting a breakpoint. If no debugging functionality is available, this statement has no effect."

If you try to inspect the page, the code will run up to the next debugger statement, where one was purposefully inserted near the top of the code. If you try to continue past it, it just loops back onto the debugger statement.

If you load the page normally without inspecting it, these debugger statements are ignored.

yes you can step though and set break points, don't ask me how tho, I've not used it seriously enough to remember.

You could attempt to read google documentation and spend hours not learning how to do something.

On a desktop browser, I pound the Escape key repeatedly to stop the loading. Many a times it works. But some sites have sneaky JavaScript loaded quite early and that starts doing some nasty stuff.

Safari still has a stop button. I still use it on a semi-regular basis.

SeaMonkey has this in the status bar! There's a little power plug icon you can click to go offline/online. It will even still happily load pages from cache while offline (so I can click from this page back to the HN front page and onto articles I've clicked on or comments I've viewed before, and it just loads them as you'd expect). If you click on a link it doesn't have cached, it'll pop up an error screen and prompt you to go back online.

I also want links back. I miss being able to click a link and open it in a new tab and whatever is SPA these days has this feature broken, navigation history is utterly broken, etc..

Ugh. I'd like to meet whoever implemented GitHub's left side file tree and shake them by the collar while asking "ever heard of the 'a' element in HTML"?

What's even worse is when they use it wrong like some places in Jira: Middle click triggers both the new tab and the javascript to navigate the current tab.

Yes! Being able to open links in new tabs was one of the greatest browser improvements ever, and now we're increasingly throwing away basic functionality that had been shown to be great 20 years ago.

We just got ServiceNow at work. Sometimes I can right (or middle) click to open something in a new tab. Other times I get a javascript:void window. Some links open in the same window, others create artificial tabs inside the webpage UI. It's all over the place and I hate it.

I want my deterministic UI back, period.

Everyone got on the bandwagon for dynamic web pages, parallel rendering, and such, which is fine. What isn't fine is when, due to said parallelism, the interface hops, skips, and jumps all over the damn place.

It's becoming clear that half the reason folks do it is because there's a slow to load ad they render right next to that critical action button/link and....Oops! Guess you wanted to find out that one trick X hates when you do it (but can't stop you) instead. Ad revenue goes up.

OMG, this! I got fired once due to a new PWA on Oracle Cloud. The interface loaded, I clicked "delete" on my desired VPS, and by the time the click registered, a different card containing a different VPS had shifted into the place of the one I was trying to get rid of. Turns out no one had turned on backups for that critical box. I sounded like a total idiot trying to explain the mistake.

Some solutions at https://artemis.sh/2023/10/12/scrollbars.html

The Firefox solution worked for me.

thank you. that, and another setting in an article linked from there fixed the impossibly thin scrollbars i had to endure in some web-apps.

Thank you for this. I have a degenerative eye issue that has basically filled my eyes with floaters. I've struggled for so long in firefox with shrinking scroll bars. The firefox config change allowed me to increase the width of the scroll bar, making it much easier to notice.

You're very welcome. I also struggle with UIs changing for style rather than substance.

I forgot to mention that there was a 900+ comment HN thread on scrollbars at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37864867 which is where I found that link.

I want User Configuration back.

The web browser is supposed to be the User's Agent, not the web developer's agent. Web pages' look and feel should reflect how I have configured my browser, now how some UX designer 3,000 miles away from me dictated. If I want scroll bars, web sites should not simply decide to hide them. If I want 36pt pink text in Comic Sans, web sites should not simply decide to ignore that and use 6pt gray-on-white Helvetica. If I want to use my entire monitor, web sites should not simply decide to put 6 inch wide whitespace borders on each side so I have to scroll through a narrow strip of text to read the page.

I'm browsing more and more pages using my browser's "No Styles" setting, although many sites seem to go out of their way to make the "No Styles" experience horrible. Some browsers have "Reader Mode" too, which often works and honestly should be the default.

Firefox can be set to ignore fonts and colors from web pages and always use your configuration (or follow your OS theme). Firefox's settings screen is a mess so it's easy to miss. If you want Firefox with a sensible UI, you could also use SeaMonkey, which is an artifact from back when software was more user-focused.

Other stuff like comments sections messes with the page length as well. At some sites the comments will be longer than the article, so you have to scroll to the end just to gauge how long you actually have left in the main piece.

I agree with the post.. but I thought it was going to talk about how on my 4k monitor, or maybe any monitor, that the width of the scroll bar on most sites is hard to hover over, click on, and scroll with mouse movements.

It's really frustrating when I want to just skim a page quickly and my options are you use my scroll wheel, or fight to click right on the thin a* scroll bar..

I'm desperate for a proper scrollbar on my Macbook. I'm certain that the lack of a fat scrollbar on Mac OS is contributing to my RSI.

I know every shortcut to scroll possible. Nothing comes close to navigating long documents than a meaty scrollbar. With current display aspect ratios, I can afford to lop 40 pixels off my screen for this one affordance.

Settings > Appearance > Show scroll bars > Always

Accesibility ? Why would i go to Settings to tell my computer that i want scrollbars, titlebars, buttons, links ? AFAIK MacOSX does not come with a touchscreen.

What? This isn't in accessibility settings, it's in appearance settings.

Is your complaint:

- You can have the UI/UX affordances that you prefer, but you resent the fact that they’re not the default affordances (and so have to affirmatively set them to match your preferences)?

- You can have the UI/UX affordances that you prefer, but you resent the fact that other people have other preferences (and wish your preferred defaults to be the only options for those affordances)?

- Something else that’s less clearly inferred?

That is on. I'm talking about wide scrollbars. Not ones you have to click with precision.

I've "lost" files on a Mac because Finder wasn't showing a scrollbar, and there was no indicator there were more files than were shown in the window. After that, I went and turned them on by default.

We did get an escalation from our customers after the UX team decided to hide the scrollbars in our datagrid. I'm not sure what the goal behind this effort besides justifying for busy work.

I had the same feeling about 10 years ago before I got a new mouse with a wheel for scrolling. Prior to that the increasingly vestigial and disappearing/reappearing if hovered over scrollbars were a huge annoyance. There should be a part of UI design that is concerned with the foibles of the particular user and automatically customizing the UI to fit them. For example font size based on age (if known). So if you enlarge one browser tab it might enlarge others until the font is a similar size.

Posted this elsewhere in the thread but am repeating here: 900+ comment HN thread

"Scrollbars are becoming a problem" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37864867

--> https://artemis.sh/2023/10/12/scrollbars.html

which offers several solutions.

So long as we're compiling an exhaustive list of web UI sins, tiny, low-contrast type. People are designing as though we still had to pay per column inch. Why? Reading is cognitively taxing enough in the best of circumstances. But old or young, we're all expected to tunnel into fine print in order to read an article. If your site is more usable in Firefox reader mode, you should be laughed out of the industry.

Yes, some sites use text that is too small, but...

Browsers have (stateful) per-site zooming and if you want all text everywhere to be bigger, operating systems (including mobile) let you adjust this at the system level.

My aggregation is the narrow paragraphs on most sites instead of flowing the entire width of the page. I assume this is so they can jam an advertisment inbetween every second sentence. There is plenty of space for scrollbars.

Makes my large high dpi monitors almost pointless.

It's rather because your average person (maybe not your average HN reader) browses the web with a single window filling the entire screen. If paragraphs did not wrap, you could end up with lines 2 feet long which require you to turn your head from side to side as you read. An open newspaper may be 3 feet across but they put the text into narrow columns for a reason.

If you want to jam in more ads, the real shithead trick is to split the story/article across multiple pages, so you get multiple page-loads per story.

Widescreen monitors, and people still using full screen with a widescreen monitors, are the issue there. Moving from Windows to OS X all those years back was what got me to move from having my applications in "windows" instead of "walls". OS X didn't really have a way to maximize stuff, just "zoom" to auto-size the window. Since I transitioned to my first widescreen monitor at the same time, this worked out really well.

For a significant number of people, they don't get any benefit from a widescreen display, because all that extra space is just empty screen due to max-width being set on the text. Of course, if the developer didn't do that, the text would be hard to read. They're saving users from themselves in many cases.

I have a site where I don't use any CSS and have a note to tell people to make their browser more narrow if they need the text to wrap so it's easier to read. Doing that, the site works on everything, no media queries required.

If you want to get rid of scroll bars at least ensure any extra items are partially shown so it's obvious you can scroll up or down.

And people ask me why I like CLIs, TUIs, Vim, Tmux and so. I’m so tired of these ever changing bullshit visual designs that sacrifice functionality in favour of form just so they can appeal to the “dumb” audience. Stop treating me like them. The same has been happening in video games too that handhold you all the way through. Just put some effort into making things discoverable and let the users do their thing.

Hot take: scroll bars have been redundant since those mouse wheel was invented. Especially the ones with momentum.

As the article describes, scrolling isn't the only use of scroll bars.

Some people (myself included) have repetitive stress pain when using the mouse wheel (and others are building towards developing that pain someday without knowing it.)

Even if not interacting with it, the scroll bar is a visual aide telling the size of the page and the location within it.

my laptop does not have a mousewheel. scrolling with the touchpad (if i even have one) does not always work either.

> scroll bars have been redundant since those mouse wheel was invented

I bet you never used a mouse wheel on Windows 10. /s

(Some time ago MS decided that focus follow mouse shall not be used anymore for mouse scrolling)

Are you referring to the "Scroll inactive windows when hovering over them" setting? This still defaults to "On" in Windows 10/11. If you were saying you _don't_ like that scroll focus follows the mouse instead of locking to the active window by default then sorry, misread your comment :).

It does not work in the file selection dialogue.

I also like my scrollbars, but why is it bright yellow?

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