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Comment by frozenport | Hacker News Reader

Should we consider an anti-bounty system where we agree to pay more to the foundation for not implementing a `feature`? I personally, don't like websites breaking the 4th wall.

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Remember, it's not just the main scrollbars at the top and bottom of the window. Some pages have internal text regions with scrollbars, and it seems reasonable to style those. Those aren't browser UI, they're UI of the page.

And, in between, there are the scrollbars on iframes and overflowed divs. They're almost always suppressed entirely... because the defaults are so ugly.

Websites already implement their own scroll bars - Gmail, Google Spreadsheets, etc.

It would be nice if instead of having to reimplement _everything_ about the scrollbar to just add a feature or two, the native one was customizable. Because frankly, people are going to change it, so might as well make things less buggy.

>Websites already implement their own scroll bars - Gmail, Google Spreadsheets, etc.

As an OS X user who enjoys not seeing scrollbars, I find Google's use of them downright intrusive.

This is a good point - users are accustomed to the scrollbar style of the system they're using (which is often an adjustable preference), so it makes sense for scrollbars in web apps to follow what the OS does.

While my scrollbar preferences are very different from yours (I prefer ones that are always-visible, large and easy-to-grab), I agree that the web apps you use should conform to your UI preferences, and not the other way around.

Gmail uses webkit scrollbar styling, they don't reimplement scrollbars from scratch. If you go to gmail in Firefox it uses the stock scrollbars, which is really a major advantage to Firefox in my mind. It's kind of like when Chrome stopped supporting the <blink> tag even though webkit still supported it.

Basically all of the times that I see this feature being used it is to make tiny, mostly transparent, or auto-hiding scrollbars that don't match the system UI at all and are a significant nuisance. I'm sure there are some sites that are styling them reasonably, but it doesn't seem to be the norm, even for the major players that have experienced design teams.

Of course nowadays we see that tiny, mostly transparent, auto hiding scrollbars are the system UI!

Scrollbar style is the 4th wall? How arbitrary can you get?

The scroll bar is (or should be!) OS-controlled. Why give people the opportunity to muck up the scroll bar and add their crazy ideas. The browser belongs to the user, not the website.

Yes, those crazy ideas, like styling buttons and text areas.

I'm sorry, I can't take this sort of complaint seriously...

Any kind of power, including the ability to style buttons, text-areas or scroll-bars, can be abused. There's always some people that (quite reasonably) feel that widespread abuse of that power justifies withdrawing it, and some people that (quite reasonably) feel that the few really good uses outweigh the potential for abuse.

And what, exactly, is going to happen if people "abuse" scrollbar styling? Or button styling?

Are we here to fight lame design fads by preventing people from building cool apps?

When I come to a website, it's usually because I want some particular piece of information (like movie times or ticket prices) or to have some particular interaction (to find new, interesting stories or to play a game). Good design (and good designers) keep that goal in mind, and support it by keeping distracting elements (possibly including weird, mis-styled scrollbars!) to a minimum, allowing me to focus.

Less-good designers just aim for making something more-or-less cohesive, and bad designers rarely aim higher than "something cool" whether or not it supports my goal. Mediocre and bad design hinders me from achieving my goal by hiding or obscuring basic tools of interaction like buttons or scroll-bars. Even good design can be a problem, if my goals do not align with what the designer had in mind (for example, the designer wants to make a good impression for first-time customers, but I'm trying to file a customer-support ticket).

I appreciate that many of the people commenting on that ticket are just trying to make the world a more pleasant place, but some times I wish browsers had a button that would blast away all the custom styling of a page and just display the content in a standardised fashion (like the Reader mode many browsers have, but not just limited to long-form articles).

If you want such a button, search for bookmarlets. I usually install one that makes all fonts the same (large) size and one that forces all texts to B/W. Can't live without it.

I agree, and I personally really hate it when websites provide their own scrolling mechanism, as it usually doesn't support two-finger (mouse wheel) scroll, doesn't have acceleration, doesn't have my OS scroll speed, etc. IMO overriding scroll bars on your site / app is almost always a bad idea, as it leads to poor UX / usability.

Edit: I'd also extend my opinion to cover things like a strip of items which must be scrolled through using other UI elements (e.g. Arrows or bubbles). While cute (maybe), this only allows uses to scroll at the one speed you give them. Just put it in a horizontal scroll or better yet, do something completely different.

I think this may be a proposal to allow for scrollers that behave natively but are visually unrecognizable as such. While in theory that may allow for the worst offenders to rein things in a bit, I suspect it will more likely be taken as an invitation for people to make their sites less usable and accessible.

I absolutely agree that reimplementing scrolling logic is absolutely awful. It's an accessibility nightmare.

But scrollbar styling is very different to scrolling logic. We're not talking about stealing people's mousewheels here, we're talking about changing scrollbar themes.

This is important for apps which want native scrolling logic inside their app but want their app to look native. The only alternative, in fact, is to reimplement scrolling logic inside the app. Performance suffers, accessibility suffers, everyone loses.

but want their app to look native.

Shouldn't you not be attempting to modify the appearance of the scrollbars and letting them be the style the OS chooses, if you want them to look "native"? These developers seem to be wanting scrollbar styling so they can make scrollbars look different from their native appearance.

There are also quite a few truly native apps which have reinvented scrollbars instead of using the OS', and they are awkward to use because they don't behave exactly like native ones do.

Sometimes I feel as if I'm talking to programmers who have zero design experience.

Behaviour is not the same as styling. A good app's scrollbars will behave natively but will look in line with the rest of the app.

Compare GMail's scrollbars, especially the ones for the XMPP Chat, between Firefox and Chrome.

You said "want their app to look native", and I'm saying that, if you do not apply any styling, the most native-looking and native-behaving things in the app probably are the scrollbars.

...or are we not agreeing on what "native" means? I've long thought it referred to the default appearance/behaviour of the OS/browser.

you realize all the things you mentioned are only reimplemented in code due to the lack of native scrollbar styling, right?

I'm not clear why it's good that you can style every other UI component except this one.

First off, because it isn't. There are a number of things that personally shouldn't be styled. Or rather, there are a number of things that should have their styles overridable without breaking things.

There are an astounding number of things I've seen abused, badly. I mean - look at the number of websites that aren't usable without a web font because they embedded all of their icons in it. Bonus points if they load the web font via JS. Bonus points if it's third-party JS.

Secondly, you cannot style every other UI component except this one. The browser chrome. The mouse pointer. The context menu (to an extent, depending on browser).

The thing with scrollbars is that they are at the boundary between the website and the browser. There are pros and cons - allowing "good" websites to apply "good" styles, but not for inane UIs.

Personally, I think that the better approach would be for the browser to color the scrollbar dependent on the background color of the page.

Honest question: How would you solve this stark difference in UIs if you're building an in-browser application? https://cloudup.com/c8K9RMqPeDn

Disclaimer: I'm the guy who submitted the bounty :)

For anyone else who doesn't want to suffer through yet another unnecessary web application:

http://imgur.com/a/mkbHB

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