Can web developers stop fucking with scroll bars please? No website is so beautiful that it justifies losing the ability to see how far the page scrolls down. I don't give two shits about your design vision.

@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

@tj Meanwhile, web developers: “Why is the livestock we’re trying to farm for its data talking? John, did you know they could talk?”

@tj Hate it. Seems like it also might be an accessibility minefield.

@tj I’ll just drop this here: https://scrollbars.matoseb.com/

@lyrial @tj
Ooh, they're interactable!

@pteryx @lyrial @tj Sadly at least the Windows scrollbars don't behave like the real thing (clicking the shaded area outside the thumb doesn't move the thumb directly to the clicked position, but instead moves it a slightly larger amount than clicking the arrows).

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

@ericjames @tj Don't use smooth scrolling at all if it's been disabled in the OS.

@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).

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

@mwt @arazil @tj OMG, I couldn't remember the name of the app that did that, and yes, it's Microsoft Lists. A previous work place used it, and I didn't even know that there were nested scroll bars until I complained that I couldn't see everything that my manager and colleague were showing me, because I'd never hovered over the lists in exactly the right position for the scroll bars to appear.

@HollieK72 @mwt @arazil @tj Try going to Windows Settings → Accessibility → Visual Effects → Always show scrollbars. It should make the OS slightly less annoying to use. There's a few other useful settings in there, too.

@tj
https://dontfuckwithscroll.com/

@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

@aligorith @tj

• 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)

Don't – if I want to go to a specific place, I can drag the thumb. Clicking the shaded area should be the equivalent of pressing PageUp/PageDown keys on the keyboard (this is something that they screwed up in the "modern" Windows UI).

@jernej__s @tj
The problem though is that as the thumb starts getting smaller, it becomes harder to hit it to drag. Then you're annoyed that you first have to make a big movement over to the scrollbar, and then also all that muscle tension trying to hold down your pointing device and carefully drag that thing.

IME, it's way faster and less annoying really to just click in the rough zone you need, then drag up and down (preferably with some of those control gain ladders with indicators - e.g. see some Houdini demo videos where they're playing with the sliders).

Experiencing a scrollbar like this is what changed my mind about them a lot I gotta admit

It went from: "why do we have these big bulky things", to, "oh, that's like a little visualization of my viewing area relative to the whole space".

@aligorith @tj On classic Windows scrollbars you can right-click the shaded area if you want to move the thumb directly. I often use the shaded area to page up and down, and scrollbars that do anything else annoy me to no end.

@argv_minus_one @tj The Sleep Number articles do this too.

@corvus_ch @tj I hit this quite recently without a satisfactory resolution.