Scrollbars: Why is Apple eradicating a linchpin of user interface design?

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/11/computer_scrollbars_why_is_apple_eradicating_a_linchpin_of_user_interface_design_.html

by davewiner • 15 years ago

20 25 15 years ago

slate.com

makecheck• 15 years ago

I'm not sure how people deal with the disappearing scroll bars if they don't have a scroll-wheel mouse. For me the missing bars are fine because I can make them reappear at any time by lightly touching the scroll wheel.

They are also surprisingly nice for the column views on Mac OS X (an interface that basically consisted of a horizontal scroll bar over a range of several vertical-scrolling lists). Now, without scroll bars, the column views look so much more sensible; before they seemed to be littered with chrome.

I don't think scroll bars should disappear completely though. It seems that muting them (e.g. becoming light gray and translucent, or thinner like they are on Linux) would be enough to keep them out of the way.

It would also help if there were some additional cue, e.g. a "fade-out" effect at the edges where more content is available offscreen.

barumrho• 15 years ago

As far as I know, scroll bars do not disappear for third party mice, but they do if you are using Apple's trackpad or magic mouse.

YooLi• 15 years ago

Wouldn't the fact that Apple is able to remove the scrollbars in several situations imply that they aren't a 'linchpin' of UI design?

I rather like that I get a little extra real-estate, but some times I would like a visual indicator that there is more to a page off-screen. The indicator, however, need not be a scroll-bar.

LeafStorm• 15 years ago

Lukas Mathis proposes an interesting solution for the "visual indicator:" http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2011/08/01/invisible_scrollbar...

simonhamp• 15 years ago

My only gripe with the smaller, hiding scrollbars is that window content goes under them and becomes occluded by them, making it near-impossible to click.

Case in point is the Chrome dev tools. Checkboxes for hotswitching CSS rules now lie directly under the scrollbar and I keep catching it when I go to untick one.

Other than that, I really don't miss them at all

Bud2• 15 years ago

a) Because it's not a "linchpin" anymore. With the advent of touch interfaces (which will sooner rather than later account for most browsing), scroll-wheel mice, and trackpads, the days in which scrolling was best/easiest accomplished by clicking on annoying ever-present pixel-wasting scrollbar arrows have ended. Good riddance to them.

b) Apple didn't eradicate anything; you can still turn the old-fashioned scrollbars back on if you choose. They just changed the default to suit what Apple believes to be what most users will choose, now and in the near future, with the hardware that most of them will be using most of the time.

tolmasky• 15 years ago

a) While this is certainly true of touch devices, it leaves something to be desired on desktop (I'll explain more below). b) Even when you turn them back on you only get those skinny things, not the fat old ones....

Scrolling can at times be very annoying now in Mac OS X -- something that simply didn't used to be the case (no one complained about scrolling before). But with these new scrollbars the following things can happen:

1. It's very hard to navigate a long list. For example, if you are in Mail.app somewhere in the middle of your messages, swipe scrolling all the way to the top can get very annoying, very fast. On iOS this isn't a problem because you can tap the top of the screen to zip up to the top, but this doesn't exist on OS X. Sure, you can always grab the knob once it shows up, but...

2. The knob is so small now that it is actually hard to grab. So when you do need to grab it, it sometimes takes a few clicks to get it. I feel bad for anyone with bad eyesight.

3. The scrollbars often overlap the content in incredibly annoying ways, for example if you are trying to select the last item in a horizontally scrolling list, the horizontal scroller will sit right on top of it and you have to wait for it to go away or you end up clicking it instead: http://i.imgur.com/NDxTb.png . This happens all the time with the Open panel.

4. Not to mention the fact that it isn't immediately obvious anymore when you have additional content to scroll.

Bud2• 15 years ago

point 1: Agree. This is an issue, although I find it mitigated by the fact that you can still grab the handle and scroll more precisely with that.

point 2: Agree, but I think on balance in most situations, I'd rather have this than the old system. I have a feeling this can and will be refined somehow.

point 3: Agree, but there were annoyances with the old scrollbars, too, although somewhat less obvious ones.

point 4: It often is still obvious from context; for instance, alphabetized lists whose visible contents end in items beginning with "b" are a hint. :)

jaylevitt2• 15 years ago

But what percentage of Lion users are on touch screens?

Zero?

Edit: For some reason I'd read the parent as saying that you didn't need visual feedback on a touch screen, which of course, you still don't have with a trackpad. Not sure how I got that.

Groxx• 15 years ago

And what percentage of Lion users have multi-touch trackpads that allow the same gestures?

Probably around 90.

willifred• 15 years ago

But I'd wager that most Lion users have a pointing device that enables easy scrolling: a trackpad, magic mouse, magic trackpad, or a mouse with a scroll wheel.

j79• 15 years ago

While it's not a touch screen, the track pads on MacBook Pros and the Magic TrackPad for desktops provide many of the touch gestures found on touch devices. So, touch screens? Maybe zero. Touch enabled? Plenty!

And, to be honest, touch gestures in general are a very welcomed change to the OS. I find the use of a mouse only needed for precision control (say, graphical work or gaming!)

joejohnson• 15 years ago

It's still there when you need it. And you can turn them on again if you want (on OS X).

ByteMuse• 15 years ago

I recently worked on a friend's macbook and this is the first thing I noticed; I'm a linux guy. After a less then ten second explanation, I got used to it.

Personally, I thought it was a nice touch - there's almost no added cost to the user, more importantly, it cleans up the interface and frees up a few px of width.

gamble• 15 years ago

It's incidents like this that always remind me how surprisingly conservative geeks can be about relatively minor changes.

I love the iOS-style scroll bars and natural scrolling in Lion. The fact that Apple is willing to make minor changes like this despite inevitable bitching by geeks is one of the things I most respect about the company.

trentonstrong• 15 years ago

I wish I could remember where I read this, or that my Google-fu was strong today, but not too long ago I read an article or mailing list post about (far-future) plans to get away from scrolling as a paradigm for navigating web pages. It is a sort of unquestioned dogma that content must be laid out vertically in a linear fashion. If I remember correctly, what was being proposed was something more contextual or reactive in nature, like flipping pages left and right or some other topology. That doesn't seem like it differs too much from hyperlinks so I must not be recalling some important fact.

Anyways, hopefully someone who knows more about what I'm trying to remember will see this.

gujk• 15 years ago

We had pages before we had computers. Unbroken or variable-broken document flow was a feature computers added.

dbvisel• 15 years ago

Historically: scrolls existed before pages, though pages were clearly the superior technology.

jheriko• 15 years ago

Actually - my experience of the new gmail interface with chrome is that I get an extra (and wholly redundant) scrollbar as a result of everything being just a little too big to fit.

Even worse the scroll bar that is part of gmail doesn't look anything like native scroll bars.

crazygringo• 15 years ago

As soon as I installed Lion, I thought I'd feel the same way.

But your post just made me realize: I haven't missed scroll bars a bit. And if you wonder if there's more content in a window, a tiny jiggle with your finger instantly reveals that.

Interestingly enough, I've even traded my Magic Mouse at work for a Magic Trackpad -- the new paradigm of gestures and swiping etc. is so useful, I don't think I'll ever go back (except when I have to do graphic design work, a mouse is essential).

spaznode• 15 years ago

Answer: scroll bars suck

tsunamifury• 15 years ago

I'm pretty sure Apple is focusing on creating visual metaphors which have a more complete real-world comparisons. There is no real-world comparison for a 'scroll bar'.

The newer UI systems are imitating paper more accurate: stacks, page turns and scrolling -- the scrollbar has less of a place in that visual metaphor.

thezilch• 15 years ago

This is one characteristic of Unity (Canonical -- Ubuntu) that I think got it right: http://design.canonical.com/2011/03/introducing-overlay-scro..., which leaves only small indicators until the bar is in proximity to the cursor (or in use). It'd be a nice touch to mobile applications, like with Android, where the scrollbar only needs to be represented by 2-3 pixels.

Scrollbars: Why is Apple eradicating a linchpin of user interface design?

Related Stories