Did I ever mention that I'd like to persuade the people who came up with "disappearing scrollbars" to consider a career outside of software development?
It may look very sleek, but it is a severe setback in usability of a GUI in my opinion.
Maybe I should just find out how to disable this in #gnome once and for all. Any hints on how to do this without spending way too much time on this?
Update: Solutions for Gnome and macOS by @ktnjared and @ibk in the replies 🙏 🧙 Power to the #fediverse
@dzu @zed The scroll bar acts as both an indicator (how far down the page am I?) and a control.
Overlay scroll bars continue to act as an indicator. As for control, there are more convenient and faster ways to scroll: On mice, you have scroll wheels. On touchpads you have gestures. On touchscreens you drag the content around with your finger. For the rare situation where you need to precisely jump around a page, you still can!
For the rest of the time, hiding scroll bars reduces visual noise
@dzu @zed They're not always invisible - they appear as you interact with the content they belong to
In basic apps the noise isn't terrible, but it scales extremely poorly to modern apps that have multiple _potentially nested_ scroll windows on screen at once
In theory, if your mouse isn't over some content you can't scroll it. Thus it's even more unlikely than usual that you care how far it's scrolled right now. So the majority of the time, the info each scroll bar presents isn't useful.
@dzu @zed Showing useless information on screen is pretty much by definition visual noise, and it interferes with the brain's ability to quickly understand what it's looking at.
Of course, if you've got some workflow (or disability) that requires you to use the GUI scroll bars or constantly refer to them, then the settings are there for you!
But this doesn't represent the most common case, which is what software caters to by default. This is why overlay scrollbars are everywhere by default
@AdrianVovk @zed Well it seems that we start from different premises, and then (unsurprisingly) we reach different conclusions. For me the indication of scroll bars is information and thus absolutely no noise and thus should not be hidden.
Here is an example of where this totally fails in #Gnome - more precisely in #SimpleScan. I scanned three empty pages and the UI somehow decided to hide the horizontal scroll bars completely, showing only two of the pages:
@dzu @zed Sounds like you're experiencing some kind of bug. The overlay scrollbars appear whenever your cursor is over the content, which in the case of simple scan is pretty much anywhere over the window. You definitely shouldn't have to maximize/restore the window to get a scroll bar to appear
In fact, on my system maximize/restore _doesn't_ make the scroll bars appear. My guess is that it brushes past your cursor and that's why they appear for you
but it scales extremely poorly to modern apps that have multiple potentially nested scroll windows on screen at once
That's an app design problem, not a scrollbar problem.
In theory, if your mouse isn't over some content you can't scroll it. Thus it's even more unlikely than usual that you care how far it's scrolled right now. So the majority of the time, the info each scroll bar presents isn't useful.
By the same argument, windows should be blanked unless moused over because if the mouse isn't over them, you can't interact with them, and no one could possibly care about data that is not immediately interactable, so why bother rendering anything at all?
@barubary @dzu @zed Some apps do this. They fade out pretty much all of their UI and only leave the main content visible on screen
Examples: image viewers, video players, text editors in distraction free mode. macOS does this with the top panel & dock when you maximize a window.
Anyway, it's a balancing act. Making huge swaths of UI appear and disappear can be more distracting and confusing than having it always visible. With scrollbars the motion is tiny and UX designers decided it's worth it
@dzu I have to agree with this. And then it's extra annoying when you do scroll and the scroll bar pops in over content.
My own application does this but it is not my fault :(
@gloriouscow @dzu My favourite example of this is the Windows password dialog: in the old one (first introduced in Vista and kept basically unchanged until the first Windows 10 release) if you wanted to change the username, you pressed ↓ on keyboard, or clicked Another user that was just under the password textbox. Windows 10 1511 (IIRC, might have been 1607) replaced this with a "modern" version, where changing the username with keyboard is basically impossible (it involves pressing Tab and Enter multiple times; the only accelerators in the dialog box are on the OK and Cancel buttons, so you can't use Alt shortcuts either), while with mouse you have to both click and scroll now; to make this worse, the "Other user" option is the last in the list that populates dynamically as Windows discovers other ways to authenticate, so you both have to wait for the list to stabilise first, and you can't rely on muscle memory either, because the number of entries will vary.
Explorer's new context menus have a similar problem – items are added dynamically after the menu is open, which has caused me to run unintended programs multiple times when I was trying to click Properties (which is the last entry, and gets pushed down as stuff is inserted in to the menu).
I once inadvertently made the worst UI experience. I had a DPI scaler tied to a slider widget, and of course, as you adjusted it the whole thing grew or shrank, meaning it was basically impossible to keep holding onto the drag handle.
@gloriouscow @dzu Microsoft's did something as bad: listboxes in modern UI adjust their width depending on content, so they'll go wider when you scroll them. If you scroll them by grabbing the scrollbar's thumb and dragging the mouse (which may be necessary if you don't want to scroll for several minutes with long lists), they can resize out of the mouse's grip area, which then resets the list's position to the top. Windows Update widget in early Windows 10 versions had this problem (they "fixed" it by making the whole page scroll), but I also recently encountered it somewhere in Windows 11.
The whole modern UI is a clusterfuck of bad design. There's basically no keyboard navigation, and even widgets where it'd make more sense to use keyboard only respond to arrow keys and PgUp/PgDn (eg. setting Windows Update time limits, or setting the date and time manually, or adding a different keyboard layout…).
Other problems include things taking seconds to minutes to display at all, and then again a long time to settle in place (because we all like clicking moving targets, right?), things that don't give any sort of indication that the click was registered (worst offender here is the activation dialog — if Windows didn't have network connection during install, it won't let you change some settings until it activates; when you click the "Fix problem" button on activation page, nothing happens for as long as 10 seconds, and you can navigate elsewhere in the Settings UI before the modal activation dialog appears).
And did I mention that the textboxes lose keystrokes if you type too fast? How the hell did they manage to do that?
@jernej__s @gloriouscow I can feel your pain. Just recently Windows 11 even hid modal dialogs for a driver installation behind another window, so I could not finish the installation in a straight forward way. In the end I used Alt-Tab to see the content of the modal dialog and then blindly use Tab and Enter to select the right choice. This experience felt like tumbling back in time for decades.
Probably this is related:
@nik @ktnjared @ibk I know that many people like to belittle the gnome developers, but I am not in this camp. I really like the Gnome desktop environment, but then again I have not tested many others, simply because in the end a DE is not an end in itself and I rather want to get work done. As long as it does not actively get into my way, I am fine with it.
Moreover, I prefer an opinionated implementation to something which tries to be a darling for everybody.
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