Can web developers stop fucking with scroll bars please?

[donhawkins@mastodon.social]

@tj @pluralistic ️️️

[aligorith@mastodon.nz]

@HunterZ @tj

Perhaps unfairly, I'm gonna blame Apple for this one

Sadly, large swathes of the UI design folks are acolytes of whatever Apple cooks up as being "The New Fashionable Thing (TM)", and all jump on that bandwagon readily.

So, even if they didn't entirely kick this off, they certainly would've inspired a good few folks down the path...

[rusty@ma.zcx.cc]

@tj I kind of figure that if a scroll bar suddenly grows when I get near the bottom of the 'page' it means that the dev only really cared about me reading up to that point. If they wanted me to read the entire post, the scroll bar would have reflected that, and I could have decided whether I had time for that at the beginning. Or scheduled it.

[tanavit@toot.aquilenet.fr]

@tj

Is not the scrollbar a feature of the browser, not the server ?

Serious question.

[corvus_ch@social.corvus-ch.name]

@tj my all time favorite: infinite scroll with footer containing links like contact, support, impressum and the like.

[kagan@wandering.shop]

@tanavit @tj It's possible to send client-side code (HTML and CSS) that change the appearance of the scrollbars (including making them completely invisible). Web developers are the people who write that code.

(I suspect web *designers* are the ones who create designs without scrollbars, and then tell the developers to turn them off. But the developers should be pushing back, pointing out that this is a major usability and accessibility problem.)

[tanavit@toot.aquilenet.fr]

@kagan

Thanks.

Is there a way to circumvent these stupidities and allow the browser to present a scrollbar when needed ?

@tj

[bebef@kowelenz.social]

@tj I wonder what you might think about the endless scrolling design pattern...

[argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org]

@tj

Some websites now display a horizontal progress bar across the top of the viewport, which fills up as you scroll down the page, exactly like a scroll bar.

Instead of just showing a scroll bar.

Madness. Absolute madness.

#webdev

[amorpheus@kind.social]

@tj When scrolling through the replies on this post, the scrollbar does not provide any reliable information on how far I am through until I reach the very end either... 🥸

[cal@kind.social]

@drewtowler @tj I strongly recommend https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/381674-don-t-with-my-scroll

[lunacolon3@blahaj.zone]

@drewtowler@mas.to @tj@howse.social the scroll effect on this website is actually genius, it shows exactly why they are so terrible. i started to feel sick from the scrolling and i dont think thats ever happened to me before

[mindpersephone@spookygirl.boo]

@tj but but my infinite scrolling!

[flesh@transfem.social]

@tj@howse.social "Can web designers stop? I don't give two shits about your design vision."

[flesh@transfem.social]

@kagan@wandering.shop @tanavit@toot.aquilenet.fr @tj@howse.social Let's not forget JavaScript, which enables a great chunk of web design fuckery.

[ericjames@booping.synth.download]

@tj@howse.social in a similar vein, don’t make a page scroll with smoothing at the beginning and in the end. it’s not natural

[ariarhythmic@ohai.social]

@TerrorBite @tj horrendous UX

[ariarhythmic@ohai.social]

@TerrorBite @tj it doesn't even look good.

[leeloo@c.im]

@tanavit @kagan @tj
There are browser extensions, but they mostly require specific code per web site, so not a universal solution.

[leeloo@c.im]

@tanavit @tj
The real one, yes.

But you can set an area of the page to overflow: hidden, meaning that if there is too much content to fit, don't display the excess - which is useful on fixed size boxes because otherwise the content overlaps with other content.

But that also means that you can hide the browser scrollbar and replace it with a slow broken one written in javascript.