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 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:
Detlev Zundel [Team Human]
gloriouscow
Jernej Simončič �