Can web developers stop fucking with scroll bars please?

[redfaceduakari@mastodon.social]

@tj I’m personally pissed off at browsers for giving web authors this ability. The browser is supposed to be the user agent! My features! Not yours!

[ferrix@mastodon.online]

@tj addendum: when you are holding the scroll bar and you're near the end finally and BOOP a bunch more content loads and your scroll bar is now insane

[arazil@elvenstar.cafe]

@tj For some reason, we ended up with ultrawide screens and tiny 5 pixel wide scroll bars. It drives me nuts. It is one of the worst modern design trends out there (along with infinite scroll and the overuse of "bubbles and/or glass everywhere" design).

[mwt@mastodon.nz]

@arazil @tj
On my work computer, we have Microsoft Lists that include nested scrollbars...

[quinn9282@mas.to]

@tj

[djsf@fosstodon.org]

@tj bold of you to assume that the scrolling is finite

[skua@mastodon.social]

@tj

"web developers stop fucking with"

Their whole fucking culture is shit.

There are exceptions.
MP3-Tag and Libation spring to mind.

But the rest, with their glitter and glam, can be happily trashed.
.

[hunterz@mastodon.sdf.org]

@tj I want to know who started the war on scrollbars...it's been ongoing for a while now, but it seems like UI/UX designers are all in lock-step on this for some weird reason.

[the_wub@mastodon.social]

@tj At least ten years late but I applaud the sentiment.

I remember the GTK3 changes to scrolling behaviour in application scrollbars.

Still fixing that every time I install a Linux with the XFCE desktop.

Then various desktops also introduced application scroll bars fading in and out around the same time.

Still fixing that every time I install a Linux with the XFCE desktop.

I still maintain that this sort of stuff, whether in web pages or applications is a variant of enshittification.

[pheonix@hachyderm.io]

@tj Yes please! Scrollbars are not meant for design, they should be strictly the browser's chrome. Between this and scroll-jacking, I don't get these trends.

[cerement@social.targaryen.house]

@djsf @tj

and then there’s web devs who put footers at the bottom of infinite scroll pages …

[aligorith@mastodon.nz]

@tj
I'd argue this applies not only to web developers (who keep trying to hide them outright), but also all OS designers who keep working harder and harder and harder to make them all but invisible + unusable! 🤬

Among other annoyances in this category are:
1) Scrollbars that are often now too thin to even aim at, which is made worse by

2) Scrollbars that are not visible by default, and will disappear mere seconds after the most recent scrolling interaction ends

3) And even when they are visible + not too thin, they are configured to be very low contrast + translucent...

Having lived through the 90's / early 2000's ugly grey MS Windows type scrollbars, I can understand why a lot of people are scarred from that experience.

But IMO, most designers took the wrong lessons from those. Key things we should've done different:
* Changed from "click to go up/down a page" (i.e. mostly pointless) to opening up "click anywhere to scroll there" (which is what a few enlightened designs do)

* Instead of making them smaller and smaller and less visible, we should've tackled instead the problem that they were no offering enough value, and instead leaned in *hard* on covering them in clickable markers (with optional additional details) to jump to useful landmarks

[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...