Scroll bars have always been both control (press here to move around) and indicator (how much of this document is there, and how far through it am I?).
replyAlways-on-screen scrollbars are only useless if you think that indication is useless. Many people find it quite valuable.
Correct, but you don't need the full thick scrollbar for the indicator function, some apps use a much smaller dot/guide
replyMore to the point, the indicator doesn’t need to always be visible to be useful. Appearing only when the viewport is noving works fine on the iPhone, for instance, because slighly moving the viewpoint to reveal it is a convenient action, and less well on desktop PCs where your hands are less likely to remain near movement controls at all times.
replyIt’s also applicaction specific: I care a lot more about relative viewport size and position when reading a long document than I do when I’m entering commands at the bottom of a terminal’s scrollback buffer.
I think elements like scrollbars remaining visible serve a useful purpose of their own. I don't just mean scrollbars in this case depicting the location in the scroll, either, but instead offering a fully predictable interface that looks the same and doesn't depend on state. Elements like scrollbars only appearing when needed- expanding when you hover near them, for example, removes some of the predictability of the interface. If you have elements all over a UI that only appear "when needed" it starts to become a bit of a circus show, IMO; ribbons or toolbars or menus that only appear when you press alt or hover near the top of a window; scrollbars that only appear when you either scroll or move the mouse near the scroll elevator area, etc.
It's some of the same push that has removed titlebars from desktop UI. Programs like Chrome spearheaded effectively taking over that area, because it's a "waste of screen space", But it's not, that screen space was used for a predictable, known UI element that used to be fully expected on all desktop UI Window elements. It's sort of like how we have with writing a predictable convention of words on a page to have margins on the left and right. If that followed the way UX has gone we'd have dismissed page margins as "wasted space" and all text would have 0" margins and run all the way to the edges of the page and we'd pat ourselves on the back for "using page real estate" more effectively.
replyNo they don't, they appear every time you scroll even if you never use the bar. And flashing of ui elements is in many cases worse than wasting that space permanently.
replyIt's a tragedy decades of UI research/design can't get any of the fundamental design elements right
I restored them and made them fat again in FireFox. It was getting too thin and hard to find
replyI hate when magically appearing scrollbars cause the screen to redraw - I especially hate it when the content needs a scrollbar if NOT present, so it appears, which makes the content reflow so it doesn't need it, and it keeps swapping back and forth.
replyGood times.
There has been a bug in Apple's Quicklook on macOS for as long as I can remember, where the right side of a document is slightly cropped when Always Show Scrollbars is enabled. It appears to expect that the scroll bars should only appear intermittently and renders over the content.
replyVery frustrating when one is scanning documents and photos, and verifying them through Finder shows phantom cropping.
I personally like the scroll bars to always be visible as they serve as both an indicator and a control.
It's really annoying that you need to click on something that the scrollbar covers up or steals focus from.
replySchrödinger's button - you go to click it, a scroll bar appears, the button moves. You go to the new button location, the scroll bar disappears, the button returns.
replyThey are handy on a tablet. At the same time they are not since dynamic content might be loaded so the true size of the page is not shown to me by the scroll bar.
replyAnd fuck anyone that likes fullscreen programs and uses multiple monitors.
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