Detlev Zundel [Team Human]May 23

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

Show threadzedMay 23
@dzu Did Jony Ive start this trend or did he just popularize it ?
Show threadDetlev Zundel [Team Human]May 23
@zed I have to admit that I have no clue. As I only use #GnuLinux with #gnome for several years now, I have no idea where it comes from. At the beginning I kind of ignored it, but it triggers me more every time I have to minutely position the cursor to even get the chance to scroll. A few months ago I switched to a trackball and thoroughly enjoy the change, but finding the scroll bars has now become a problem and I don't really understand why this happened at all. 🤯
Show threadAdrian VovkMay 24

@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

Show threadDetlev Zundel [Team Human]May 24
@AdrianVovk @zed Hi Adrian, thanks for your reply, but I wholeheartedly disagree. Something invisible can - by definition - not be an indicator for anything. Visible scrollbars are an important information for me to interact with the content. For whatever it is worth, I never had the feeling that those scroll bars are visual noise. On the contrary, they are visible information that I require, so hiding it is crippling me by intention. Hiding this information is misguided in my opinion.
Show threadAdrian VovkMay 24

@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.

Show threadOriel Jutty 

@AdrianVovk @dzu @zed

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?

May 24 at 9:43amWeb
Show threadAdrian VovkMay 24

@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