Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

https://ashlan.com/blog/why-does-apple-hate-the-scrollbar/

by samemail88 • 4 years ago

25 57 4 years ago

MBCook• 4 years ago

I turn it back on too.

This seems like a “designer run amok” kind of thing. Someone with power decided it was “clutter” and you don’t really need it except when scrolling so they removed it despite all the very real downsides.

I keep hoping they’ll go back (like natural scrolling) but I realize that’s unlikely.

_aavaa_11• 4 years ago

The article makes it sound like the scrollbar has been removed and is only accessible if the setting is turned on.

Seems silly. All you have to do is start scrolling and you immediately see the scrollbar.

lapcat• 4 years ago

"until you start moving down a webpage" is literally in the second sentence of the article.

_aavaa_11• 4 years ago

Yes, but the talk about all of the benefits makes it sound like you don't get those benefits unless you enable it all the time.

E.g. "The first and basic thing is it allows you to grab the scroll bar and move down the page quickly. You don't have to double finger scroll over and over to get to the bottom of a very long page. You can simply drag and pull it to your desired location."

You know what? if you move your mouse all the way to the right to scroll with the bar you can also scroll for a fraction of a second to reveal it so you can grab it.

samemail884• 4 years ago

Most non tech users never change the defaults on their phones/laptops. This means for those users, the scrollbar is effectively removed (other than scrolling).

_aavaa_11• 4 years ago

I don't buy it. As soon as they start scrolling it "magically" appears again and thus it's not removed.

wizofaus• 4 years ago

The same is true on Android though, at least in your web browser? And when you do start scrolling what does appear is so subtle as to be effectively not there, and can't be used for scrolling anyway (it's just a visual indicator of scroll position).

Agreed for full size desktop/ non-touchscreen devices there's no good reason to hide it, and worse I've had occasions where I literally couldn't find functionality because I had no idea a menu was scrollable.

samemail884• 4 years ago

I agree, at least with the phone, there's limited screen. There's NO reason why the scrollbar should be invisible for the desktop though.

_aavaa_11• 4 years ago

You can hide it for the same reason people choose to hide their bookmark bar, or reading list, or dock. They simply don't want it to take up room on the screen so they can focus on the website

jbotz• 4 years ago

Funny, Apple pretty much invented the scrollbar. Well, they copied a lot of the GUI ideas from the Xerox Star which had a scrollbar, but it was quite different. The currently almost universal one with a handle that indicates relative position and that you can drag with the mouse was first seen in the Apple Lisa, I think.

Also, it's not only Apple that seems to hate the scrollbar nowadays. I'm seeing lots of apps (especially electron apps) that don't show a scrollbar until you mouse over it, and what's worse is that there are often multiple scrollbars for different screen areas/frames, but it's not entirely obvious which is which, and you have to do mouse-overs for them to even appear.

jgalt212• 4 years ago

It's like Apple goes out of their way to violate the principle of least astonishment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...

rahen• 4 years ago

"The scroll bar has been around since the start of computers"

They had scrollbars in the fifties?

thfuran• 4 years ago

Alan Turing built the first scrollbar in a cave with a box of scraps.

dt2m• 4 years ago

It looks a lot cleaner without. I prefer it the way it is

xdennis3• 4 years ago

This is the same way Apple designs cables. Every engineer ever has known that you need add strain relief for cables, but Apple removes them because "it doesn't look clean". There's also probably a financial incentive.

ksaj4• 4 years ago

That's probably also why Apple's USB adapters all look the same, even if they aren't. You can only tell by looking at the actual connector.

protastus• 4 years ago

Apple, Android, Windows. Every OS has jumped into this bandwagon. Usability keeps deteriorating at the expense of aesthetics.

I resent designers for messing up user experience, pushing the industry away from good solutions that were discovered and implemented decades ago.

rocket_surgeron• 4 years ago

For me personally, a persistent scrollbar is as relevant to usability as the {x,y} coordinates that old Unix windowing systems like MWM or CDE used to draw whenever you moved or resized a window.

There were many, MANY extremely intelligent and highly technical people who got into very long flame wars when the feature of displaying the X and Y coordinates of the center of a window and the corners whenever it was moved, was removed.

And now it seems silly.

What use case is there? Knowing all of the time how much of a webpage is left below the bottom of a window? That is not relevant information to most people and becomes immediately available as soon as you move your fingers 1mm to scroll through the contents of a window.

Quickly jumping position in a long window? Normal users don't care and power users use HOME, END, PGUP, PGDOWN or other keyboard shortcuts because it is very highly unlikely that you know the exact percentage of a window you need to scroll through and the time taken removing your hands from the keyboard exceeds the time saved by knowing that direct percentage anyways.

I have a Model M and fancy-pants trackball but the vast, overwhelming majority of users are interacting with their computers using a touchpad or their fingers. To the point that mouse users should be deprioritized to enhance the experience of the majority.

Removing persistent scrollbars puts the needs of the many ahead of the few.... or the one.

StewardMcOy• 4 years ago

I see this framed as a touch vs. mouse debate often, and it's understandable since non-persistent scrollbars originated on smartphones, but I think even touch interfaces would benefit from persistent scrollbars.

At my work, we recently had a bug filed where a lot of users were reporting that one of the pages didn't have all the controls it ought to. It turned out that those users needed to scroll down to get to those controls, but they didn't realize they could scroll. At the common viewport size they were using, the page looked complete. It didn't look like there was anything to scroll.

If there was a persistent scrollbar, the user could have easily seen that there was more content to scroll to.

Now, you could say that the design of that page was bad if users had to scroll to important controls, and you might have a good case. In this case, the controls weren't the most important part of the page, and modern design favors decreasing density. There are always going to be cases where users aren't going to realize they can scroll.

Windows phone tried to solve this is in the most disorienting way possible by making sure things were always getting cut off on the sides that you could scroll, but other than that blip in history, there's been no standard replacement for the scrollbar for informing users they can scroll.

hulitu• 4 years ago

" What use case is there?"

I need to scroll the damn thing. Not with the mouse scroll ( too rough) not with the keyboard ( i don't want to lose keyboard focus from the current element). I just need to scroll. I don't have time to wait until the scrollbar appears, i don't want to click for it to appear. I just want it there.

rawTruthHurts• 4 years ago

What use case is there?

If I don't see a scrollbar I don't scroll down. A scrollbar indicates that there is content below the fold.

samemail884• 4 years ago

I think Apple was the first to jump on this bandwagon. The others are following along.

The5thElephant• 4 years ago

Thanks to scroll wheels and trackpads I don't need to awkwardly click and drag a scrollbar, and 99% of the time where I am in the scroll is irrelevant to me, so I very much prefer the disappearing scrollbar and the fact that the only people I see who turn it back on are a small percentage of developers it is fairly clear most users don't really miss it either.

That being said I would love if it was easier to add an overflow indicator using just CSS for situations where it is less apparent that a sub-element of a page can scroll.

nine_k• 4 years ago

I'm fine with the scroll bar disappearing as a control.

But I badly want it as an indicator. More than once, using macOS or mobile OSes I could not realize that an area contains much more items than meets the eye, because nothing suggested that I should scroll.

This, of course, is due to the general tendency of throwing UI discoverability under the bus of "clean looks".

sdflhasjd• 4 years ago

Related tangent: You can tell when a website has been built and tested exclusively on Macs by the messed up layout due to the reserved scrollbar space on other OSs.

Even big, 'reputable' companies do this.

omar_alt• 4 years ago

I remember a running something in the Terminal around 10.5 that put up and down scroll buttons at the the top and bottom of the scroll bar. They were useful for the time.

hourago• 4 years ago

This makes a lot of sense. Like with brutalism the first designers created beautiful and useful art. But as the movement expanded, limited time and budget, bad copies, and misunderstanding of the movement created authentic monstrosities.

In some cases removing the bar made sense. Now it's just fancy copy/paste where it does not apply and the bar would have been useful.

ksaj4• 4 years ago

The library for University of Toronto is a pretty awesome example of brutalism done right. It looks different from every side, and it is massive.

But like you've alluded to, for every good example of brutalism, there are terrible ones.

retrocryptid• 4 years ago

The scroll-bar reminds Apple of when their primary product was desktop computers. They're now an AR / Autonomous Driving / Cloud / Streaming company. Anytime anyone intimates they once made computing hardware, it lowers their multiple.

david2ndaccount3• 4 years ago

If you are using a trackpad or a touch screen, they are not very useful.

layer83• 4 years ago

They serve to indicate the scroll position and the relative size of the scrolled view (and the fact that there is a scrollable view in the first place), and to quickly scroll a longer range.

david2ndaccount3• 4 years ago

They still exist (they appear when scrolling), but for regular use with a trackpad you don’t need to move your pointer into the scrollbar. Having them always visible is unnecessary and gets crowded when you have more than one scrollable region.

gumby• 4 years ago

The scroll bar has been around since the start of computers ...

Actually not; I first saw a scrollbar on an Alto in the late 70s. Computing had been around for three decades at that point.

Not that I like the scrollbar. The Apple ones appeal to me because 1 - they are only there when I want one (which is almost never) and 2 - even then they are quite small.

Even if you like the scrollbar, this mechanism seems like it would be good when you can scroll different parts of the display, parts that may not even be delineated by a box.

ksaj4• 4 years ago

Likewise in 1973, the Symbolics Lisp Machines had scrollbars in both X and Y axes for any window that needed them.

lispm• 4 years ago

more like 1983

Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

Related Stories