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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

That results in the first outcome: the content is centered on the screen, which puts it under the sidebar, while there's perfectly good space being ignored off to the right of it.

It's a cute trick, please don't use it, this is one of many reasons why. If I have a sidebar open, it's because that space is not yours to care about.

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> If I have a sidebar open, it's because that space is not yours to care about.

Drawing UI is hard. Firefox likes to draw the websites underneat the scrollbar. Google likes to draw system nabigation buttons over the window with all kind of funny interractions. That's what happenes when you train people "on the job".

> Firefox likes to draw the websites underneat the scrollbar.

This was a choice that they actively made. It's not hard by default, they just chose to do something stupid because they think it looks pretty.

The way I read the parent commenter it almost seems like they feel that Google's decision was the really stupid one. Maybe neither one is that great.

I also agree it's stupid when google puts UI over the webpage, but at least in that case they're not going out of their way to do it over an existing alternative.

For anyone not aware of how bad google is getting about this: Did you know that "sign in with Google" panel that appears in the top right corner of websites is actually part of Chrome rather than the website?

I genuinely like the trend towards invisible scrollbars that only become larger if you want to drag them with the mouse, and that don't affect layout. This seems like a win for having more screen real-estate, both for the whole window and for smaller scrollable elements where the scrollbar might otherwise be a noticeable fraction of the element's size.

You can also get layout glitches if you screw up your math where the scroll bar disappears and reappears in a tight loop. This is a dodge for that. The viewport doesn’t resize when the content gets longer and you either run never into > 1024 || > 1024, or you hit it on first paint and it gets solved at design time.

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