I Want My Scrollbar Back

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.

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.

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..

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.

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

The Firefox solution worked for me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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