I like using scrollbars
Personal website of Martin Tournoij (“arp242 ”);<br>writing about programming (CV) and various other things.
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Contact at<br>martin@arp242.net or<br>GitHub.
I like to use scrollbars. I move my mouse cursor to the scrollbar handle and<br>move it about – scrolling like this is so much faster than with the wheel if you<br>want to scroll more than a few lines.
I didn’t notice how often I did this until sites started breaking this. It seems<br>to be fashionable to put a margin around the entire document, resulting in the<br>scrollbar no longer being aligned to the edge of the screen.
This is an absolute bollockache because now you can no longer just move the<br>mouse to the edge of the screen: you need to place it exactly on the<br>scrollbar, requiring far greater precision.
You can see an example at /scrollmargin.html. You need a<br>device with a mouse cursor to see the problem of course.
Some real examples, all of which started doing it in the last year or so:
FastMail
Outlook365
Stack Overflow “Beta Redesign”, although that was aborted.
Spotify (example)
GitLab (example)
Couchsurfing now completely hides the scrollbar (example)<br>(aside: I am not saying that Couchsurfing has been infiltrated by AirBnB<br>agents to run this communist woke libtard competition in to the ground, but I<br>am saying that nothing Couchsurfing has done over the last 10 years<br>contradicts that hypothesis.)
There is of course also the perennial “inappropriate scrollbar styling” problem,<br>and recently ultra low contrast have also gained popularity; for example:
Substack (example)
MariaDB documentation (example)
I’m not against any scrollbar styling; in some cases it’s appropriate. Some<br>more playful websites, some very specific and rare webapp use cases, things like<br>that. I’m not a “system behaviour in every single last scenario” purist. The<br>MariaDB reference docs is very much not one of those cases.
I like using scrollbars. I can’t be the only person who does. You’re frustrating<br>users for no reason other than following some fad that makes things look ever so<br>marginally nicer. No one pays that much attention to your design and they won’t<br>notice. In ten years time everyone will look back at this in the same way we<br>look back that extremely low contrast text fad from a decade ago: “yeah, that<br>was rather silly”.
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