I never understood graphic designers absolute disdain for the scrollbar. It’s so useful to see at a glance how far into a document you are. Even most PC web browsers now hide it unless you mouse over it as if it was some embarrassing necessity they don’t want to admit is still useful.
Yes but also i have a tiny screen so i like to hide it sometimes
I like this style!
I hate offscreen content that’s not indicated by a scrollbar. And the worst thing is some fancily animated presentation that uses the hidden scrollbar as a seek bar.
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I think a lot of “modern” scrollbars are just there as an affordance so you know that the content is scrollable and how far you’ve scrolled down, not to actually click and drag. Not entirely sure about the UX research for this but my guess is that it’s because most people either physically drag (like with a touchpad or touch screen) or use a mousewheel to scroll down.
The scrollbars in Linux are functional. They can be rather narrow depending on the DE and theme, but it’s usually easy enough to make them bigger if needed.
Some sites and apps have custom scrollbars. I don’t like it, but they do exist.
Websites can change the colour of the scrollbars, in which case they’re no longer system-rendered ones.
Mac an iOS scroll bars work well most of the time. Sometimes they do fade out a bit faster than it’d like though. But they are touchable.
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You can turn them on in permanently in the desktop os, but I’ve never liked in the phone.
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They grow when you mouse over them, or at least did. I got used to not needing them with touchpad scrolling being so good on Macs.
What a nice little comic, shame you forgot about community rule #4
There is also a redbubble 😉
Its usually not a rule break when the creator themselves posts it lol.
I know, its was a subte joke and bonus plug for their merch store ;)
Ah haha, I gotcha. Good work!
Thanks for the clarification, I was genuinely confused.
Thank you!
Just because it’s not visible until you scroll doesn’t mean it’s not there. What pointing device doesn’t have scrolling capabilities anymore, anyway?
I don’t know. I woke up, saw some random comment on mastodon about shitty scrollbars and drew this before I had my first coffee.
Probably talking about phone apps.
Why would you need a scroll bar on mobile screen?!
Honestly? Haven’t run into a need for one necessarily except with bad phone ui apps that ignore gesture controls.
Ability to seek really fast to direct places without having to flick your screen over and over and over and over and over and over and fight the acceleration and max speed on a laggy ass webpage in a pos operating system
Not even God knows, but I’ve seen them, they suck bad.
Some websites / web apps have the opposite problem: too many scrollbars.
MacOS has a setting to hide scrollbars when a mouse isn’t plugged in (i.e. when just using the trackpad on a laptop), and it’s enabled by default. Even if you force a scrollbar to appear using CSS (
overflow: scroll), it won’t appear.I’ve seen sites where some boxes had two or three sets of scrollbars, because the developer didn’t test on desktop OSes other that MacOS (or on MacOS with a mouse plugged in) and didn’t realise that their CSS was adding scrollbars to too many elements.
In any case, your design should have an affordance to show that there’s more content that can be scrolled to. A common way to do it is fading out or having a shadow on the scrollable edge. This technique is close to 15 years old but I still see it used today: https://css-tricks.com/books/greatest-css-tricks/scroll-shadows/. The Chrome dev site has some brief notes on some more modern techniques: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/modern-web-guidance/guides/ui-atoms/scrollability-affordance-hints
