Mozilla Bug 77790: Style the scrollbar
bugzilla.mozilla.org
bugzilla.mozilla.org
Those JS solutions out there are quite sucky. Oh, hey, sorry, we just broke scrolling down using your spacebar.
It's not very easy, for example, for the elderly, and persons with some types of disability, to get used to things changing all the time, and having a different mental context for the controls of one site/application vs another.
I think computer people really underestimate how much the average user values consistency and predictability, and how much they hate change. There's no other tool we ask humans to use that looks and acts completely differently every 2-5 years.
Edit: Actually, on thinking about this, computer people also value consistency: How would you like it if all your vim keybindings were changed? They just don't extend that courtesy to their users.
I wonder if there's something of an age/cultural separation at play here. Back in the 90s when desktop environments were a point of wide discussion and interest, there was a piece of "common knowledge" that it's important for all the user's applications to have a consistent look+feel. Furthermore, that look+feel was in their control via desktop manager settings: so you could choose large font-sizes, high-contrast window borders and cursors, scrollbar widths, stuff like that.
The web used to follow that same themeing, or at least tried to; hence specific UI controls were part of HTML, and the browser could defer to the platform toolkit to render them. That mechanism has been abandoned by the Web as it has moved towards a full application-platform, where every webpage re-implements its own toolkit and decides how things should look+feel. Which is directly the opposite of the "consistent-look desktop" philosophy.
There are some good reasons why that happened, but I think a whole lot of bad ones too. Taking the user's scrollbar out of their control, into the webpage designer's, is just another UI control ripe for abuse.
I guess the only question is that, since webpages render their own controls for everything else, shouldn't they be able to make the Firefox scrollbar consistent with the rest of it? But then, why is the Firefox scrollbar coming into play at all, when they could already just implement their own as a Javascript control?
Or it can steal focus from the content it self, if your website is a darkly colored one and you have massive light grey scrollbar in middle of the site.
Of course, there are bad designers, but they get filtered out by users not going back to their site.
In the end, the designer should have control over every pixel on his product. Any OS branding should disappear from view, because the web advances faster than OS UI design.
Also, this problem was the same back in the 90's. There was the default terrible OS user interface, and some apps decided to make their own much nicer interface.
Kai Power Tools immediately comes to mind, as well as any game with their own UI.
> the designer should have control over every pixel on his product.
That's why I can't increase the font sizes or zoom in on mobile browsing, to aid my poor eyesight. Sigh. Why should USERS never have control, but you give bad designers a free pass? That's an awfully totalitarian view of computing, and leads to many unbearable situations.
> Of course, there are bad designers, but they get filtered out by users not going back to their site.
No. As I mentioned in another comment, you can't just pick-and-choose websites like equivalent oranges. Each website is different, and while occasionally you can choose which blog you read, you can't so easily select which government agency you need to engage with. We all have to deal with the designer's choices, good or bad.
A tangent, but back to this:
> the designer should have control over every pixel on his product.
How is it appropriate to discuss the web in this manner? The web is a communication mechanism, and it was intended to be easy for people -- end users, real people -- to make their own webpages. Now it's just for "products" created by professional designers? We have given up so much.
You'll have to deal with them anyways. Every government site is pretty much horrible - they don't even need any advanced UI capabilities to make them unusable.
This discussion is about enabling advanced UI capabilities for top designers.
> How is it appropriate to discuss the web in this manner? The web is a communication mechanism, and it was intended to be easy for people -- end users, real people -- to make their own webpages.
The web is a one-way communications medium. It's not a two-way medium. You'll need to go to phone/chat/email for that.
And, with a one-way medium, the message should be decided by the sender, not the receiver.
Were you disappointed when Flash sites fell out of favor? Users has so little control over those sites.
How many fashion sites do you visit? Do you use your own style-sheets when browsing them? How does your own font enhance your shopping for their fashion items?
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/stylish/ [2] https://userstyles.org/styles/83431/minimal-floating-scrollb...
These kinds of floating scroll bars really should be the default for all OSes. Presence of scroll bars changing the width of the window contents and causing repaints/reflows is really poor UX in my humble opinion.