Don't use custom CSS scrollbars

https://ericwbailey.website/published/dont-use-custom-css-scrollbars/

by Twixes • 3 years ago

382 242 3 years ago

Minor49er• 3 years ago

On the contrary, we should be encouraging people to customize scrollbars so that scrolling is taken into consideration again. It can help get rid of trends like invisible/hidden scrollbars or those useless horizontal progress bars that shows how far into a page you've read

kypro• 3 years ago

There's been an ongoing trend in UI design in recent years to assume more and more of the user.

The removal of scrollbars from browsers confused my parents. Instead of having up and down arrows by your content now you're just expected to just know that you scroll with your mouse / trackpad. Similarly, modern versions of Windows will just assume you know that the four squares at the bottom of your screen is where you need to click to start using your computer, and Mac will just assume you know the red dot closes the current window. These patterns probably seem obvious to us as power users, but I find average users get endlessly confused by them.

And it's not just elderly people who get tripped up by this. I've seen kids who have primarily used phones and tablets growing up get confused when they first use a desktop computer because they haven't yet learnt all the required prerequisite UI patterns. Even as a power user if you switch from Windows to Mac (or vice versa) it often takes some time just figure out all of the completely unintuitive modern UI because the UI designer is lazily assuming you already know how to do everything...

Just yesterday my girlfriend (who uses her computer almost every day) asked me for help replying to an email in outlook on her laptop. Confused I asked, "what do you mean you need help replying to an email?". Well, she was confused because she doesn't use outlook much and didn't know she needed to click the small curved arrow icon to reply to an email. For the last 5 minutes she had been stupidly looking for a button that said "reply".

While I completely agree with your sentiment about scroll bars, I feel like this a much bigger issue and one that web developers shouldn't be required to fix. The core issue here is that your OS / browser shouldn't be hiding your scrollbar to begin with... This isn't something web developers should be addressing, but the UI designers who think it's preferable for me to have a browser URL bar that is 80% of my screen width at the expense of the word "back" on my back button.

abhibeckert2• 3 years ago

These patterns probably seem obvious to us as power users, but I find average users get endlessly confused by them.

They're obvious to power users because we have seen them a million times before.

When a web developer does a custom scroll bar that is when "average" users get confused, because suddenly they're presented with something they haven't seen.

It's not too much to expect a user to know how scrolling works by default in their client operating system/browser. It _is_ asking too much to expect users to know how scrolling works when you customise how it works. Web developers should not be touching this stuff.

WWLink• 3 years ago

And it's not just elderly people who get tripped up by this. I've seen kids who have primarily used phones and tablets growing up get confused when they first use a desktop computer

It goes the other way as well lol. There's lots of ridiculous random gestures for android/iOS

Pathogen-David• 3 years ago

In general it feels like a lot of UI design these days is optimizing for looking pretty in screenshots and photos rather than being useful as a tool, it's honestly gotten really frustrating in recent years.

andersrs2• 3 years ago

The worst pattern I've seen is setting the page height to the viewport height and then placing scrollbars on containers. For example this particular UI library has managed to break print layout and page navigation keys and mouse scrolling until you focus the content div https://www.skeleton.dev/docs/get-started

I was once guilty of doing this on a site I made but the users called it out so I fixed it. It's another thing for a UI library to spread this pattern.

yonixw• 3 years ago

Oh the pain of printing any modern news site with their fixed headers and popping ads. You just select the text and "R-CLK->Print selected" praying that at least the content is just a list of paragraphs (<p>) and nothing more...

pessimizer2• 3 years ago

I usually go into the inspector, find the element that contains the story and "screenshot node." Or I go the opposite way and "block elements" with ublock until I get a reasonable page, then delete all of those rules after I print. Unless they have a print stylesheet, of course. People still do those.

andersrs2• 3 years ago

Fixed headers and popups that are not a problem per se but it's bad implementations that cause the problems. It's possible to use a print stylesheet to hide certain elements and set the background to white.

luisgvv• 3 years ago

Saw this once, it was a nightmare to maintain the page once it got out of control

circuit107• 3 years ago

What about when a native scroll bar looks completely off compared to the the theme of the rest of the page?

burnte• 3 years ago

Function over form. If fancy scrollbars make it harder to use, then they should be gone. Design should never trump utility.

circuit107• 3 years ago

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13787163/161954436...

Wouldn’t this look completely off with a massive light mode default Chromium scroll bar in the middle of everything? When I was developing that my main goal was to get the UI looking consistent and clean so it would feel good to use, which I think is an underappreciated thing; if your UI doesn’t “feel right” then people won’t enjoy using it no matter how functional it is

To be fair it probably does have contrast issues which I could improve

Note: it’s an Electron app so maybe that’s different

okanat4• 3 years ago

Think like this: They have never been a part of the theme of the page. Just like the user's magenta tabbar

circuit107• 3 years ago

It’s an Electron app in my case so there’s no browser chrome for it to fit into, and the scroll bar is also in the middle of dark-themed content:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13787163/161954436...

Gualdrapo• 3 years ago

The thing is that the looks of scrollbars vary so much between platforms - on mobile you can barely see them only when you do the action of scrolling! So it would be rather weird that, if you are seeing a website in mobile and you just put a scrollbar because reasons, you're quitting some horizontal/vertical space to the effective area of the website.

And note that the act of scrolling is much more related to the OS host rather than something the website itself should provide (now, if there was an standard way across every device to scroll to the very top or the very bottom of a view (webpage, list, etcetera...). I am a designer myself but I agree than we should not mess with them. And the plus that it's a bit less of work for us (and devs, when they have to implement those things).

circuit107• 3 years ago

It’s an Electron app for me so it’s only going to be on Chromium on desktop

But if scroll bars can be themed with CSS now, that should still give the browser control over things like whether they take up space or not and the actual scrolling behaviour, right? It would just allow the developer to give some styling hints so it doesn’t look completely disconnected from the rest of the page

wpm• 3 years ago

You'll live.

jabroni_salad• 3 years ago

This is actually why I have been resisting the new tweetdeck experience. (That and the activity feature being removed). The scrollbars are so bad on Windows. The screenshots I have seen from mac look nice enough, but windows scrollbars were never meant to be in the middle of the webpage 6 times.

willio582• 3 years ago

On pages, I fully agree. Within components, I also agree but I've found it hard to push back when a design calls for scrollbars because the alternative is... what?

It can be difficult to visually say "Hey, you! There's more to see if you scroll down in this area" You can try to use gradients with fade-outs, you can try to make it so the top of the last item in a scroll area is just visible enough to make it clear something can be scrolled into view. I've also seen actual text-based messages at the bottom of scroll areas to let users know. But at that point, is it really better than creating your own little scroll bar?

Really I think we just need better APIs from the browsers to customize when a scroll bar is shown (again, not on the page level but within scrollable elements), and what it looks like. This has already gotten much better over the years but there are still some features that would be great to have in this area.

One thing I will say is I really dislike the smooth-scrolling behavior that some sites build in with JS. It's usually broken on macs that already have smooth scrolling and it's just a dumb thing to add.

Sohcahtoa824• 3 years ago

One thing I will say is I really dislike the smooth-scrolling behavior that some sites build in with JS. It's usually broken on macs that already have smooth scrolling and it's just a dumb thing to add.

I'm fairly sure every platform uses smooth scrolling by default, and so I'm absolutely and utterly baffled as to why web devs think they need to implement it in JavaScript.

If you're on a platform without it, or you've explicitly disabled it, there's probably a good reason for it, so re-adding it with JavaScript is taking away agency from the user.

munk-a2• 3 years ago

Within components, I also agree but I've found it hard to push back when a design calls for scrollbars because the alternative is... what?

Accessibility. Mention that blind users will be unable to utilize the site without a lot of additional work and you can usually kill it dead.

Custom scrollbars are such a niche thing that usually nobody is married to the idea - I've found it quite easy in the past to kill off those sorts of weird quirks in design with just that word... If you still have issues mention that mobile browsers often do a lot of customization around bounce scrolling and the like. Building this design choice out now likely means that whenever Apple releases a new phone it's quite possible that your site look antiquated and requires some major reworks.

agos3• 3 years ago

are blind users impacted by styling scrollbars with css or even hiding/showing them?

hoherd• 3 years ago

Can you give an example of when a design calls for stylized scrollbars and there is no alternative.

tsimionescu11• 3 years ago

Say your app is satirizing flashy magazines with a funky magenta-and-yellow color theme. Would you like a gray scrollbar in the middle of the page? Or, if your app is a medieval role playing game with a wooden theme for the UI, would you expect flat gray scrollbars to work well?

Izkata• 3 years ago

Really I think we just need better APIs from the browsers to customize when a scroll bar is shown (again, not on the page level but within scrollable elements)

What do you have in mind beyond "always show", "show if needed", and "always hide"? Those have all existed for decades as "overflow: scroll", "overflow: auto", and "overflow: hidden".

post-it2• 3 years ago

`overflow: hidden` hides the actual content. GP wants the element to be scrollable with a hidden scrollbar.

marcosdumay• 3 years ago

There is somebody on another thread asking for "stick to the visible margin of the element". But I guess most people want to change the scrolling behavior or appearance.

okanat4• 3 years ago

I wonder if there is a way to override the entire web with a custom stylesheet plugin like Stylus for Firefox.

henriquez• 3 years ago

You could use Gemini as an alternative to HTTP / HTTPS. No weird surprises in a text-based browserspace.

okanat4• 3 years ago

This is a non-answer though. Most of the web is in HTTP nobody can change that.

pvinis• 3 years ago

this post could have been way less that a million lines long. maybe if it had a nice colored scrollbar it would be more pleasant to read.

kidding aside, it is longer that it could be, to get the point across. maybe the browser just needs a similar setting to the macos and windows one, to never use css on scrollbar, and we're good?

_madmax_• 3 years ago

I'll use whatever the hell I want, lol.

preommr• 3 years ago

Don't use custom CSS scrollbars

Alright, I guess I'll go back to using js scrollbars instead /s

I hate articles like this because they present highly opinionated solutions as something definite even though it has a narrow focus on what the author cares about.

Web apps can be incredibly powerful and convenient, sometimes a scrollbar is in the middle of the page like with that codepen. In those situations, being able to style and control the width of the scrollbar is useful.

How about we hold developers accountable for their work instead of trying to ruin it for the rest of us because a minority do something badly.

abhibeckert2• 3 years ago

being able to style and control the width of the scrollbar is useful

No it's not. I have operating system wide settings for how scroll bars should work and the rules are complex with visibility and size of the scroll bar changing from one second to the next.

I expect my scroll bar settings to apply to all websites and they are significantly better than what codepen does.

Codepen also doesn't allow me to scroll past the beginning/end of the file, which feels jarring and just wrong with a touch scroll device.

And I'd bet it also falls apart with assistive technology for people who can't physically operate a mouse or trackpad, which in most countries is illegal. Why open yourself up to those issues?

fbrchps• 3 years ago

highly opinionated solutions as something definite even though it has a narrow focus on what the author cares about

Most users either don't have such strong opinions about their scroll bars, or would prefer it looks coherent with the application, or OS-native (your preference). But I can almost guarantee the larger group of non-technical users will have never thought about the styling of their scrollbars for more than a few seconds.

Also in terms of accessibility, so long as they're doing CSS-only changes, and the bar is sized compliant and has proper focus states, assistive technology won't care.

MereInterest2• 3 years ago

Or to phrase it a different way: Being able to style and control the width of the scrollbar is so incredibly useful that it must be in the hands of users, and not designers.

afavour• 3 years ago

Codepen also doesn't allow me to scroll past the beginning/end of the file, which feels jarring and just wrong with a touch scroll device.

Stuff like this often happens because of a lack of native styling options. Can’t change the appearance of the scroll bar (for, yes, often dumb reasons)? OK then we’ll use a giant JS library that poorly replicates every aspect of scrolling.

At least with native scroll styling, ugly as it may be, you get native behaviours.

eviks7• 3 years ago

Interesting setup, do you have a link to it?

kelnos3• 3 years ago

I hate articles like this because they present highly opinionated solutions as something definite

The first paragraph says "I feel this is a mistake". The author is very clearly expressing an opinion, not a fact. They go on to attempt to justify their opinion. I feel like you're railing against something that... isn't really happening here.

I will grant you that there are some very narrowly-defined situations where styling a scrollbar is useful and actually gives a better experience. But in general, leave them alone. They are browser chrome, and should not be touched by webpages themselves.

arp242• 3 years ago

being able to style and control the width of the scrollbar is useful.

Useful for who? I set my scrollbar width fairly wide intentionally so I can actually click on the thing and use it without too much effort. Some developers thing it's "useful" if I'm not able to do that by setting a significantly smaller width, which is not useful at all for me because every single time it makes the experience worse.

In some fairness, the fault is also with Firefox and Chrome for not being able to just say "never style scrollbars" like you could with Opera in 2000. Sigh...

pwdisswordfishc• 3 years ago

For control-freaks who think they are the second coming of WinAmp and like to micromanage every single aspect of user experience so that it conform to THE BRAND®™.

nikau• 3 years ago

Sure let's just reenable blink and marquee in that case

jbverschoor• 3 years ago

fwiw, I have enabled "always show scrollbars" on macOS, and I frequently use them on my iPhone too.

One of the most frustrating thing on the web is capturing any scrolling behavior, or catching conflicting keystrokes (such as cmd-f on some fora).

jchw• 3 years ago

My kneejerk response to articles with these sorts of titles is nearly always just, "No thanks."

I know "considered harmful" has become a cliche, but I almost miss that format now.

leokennis2• 3 years ago

There should be simple OS level overrides on CSS. Not a user stylesheets or extensions or hard to find a browser flag, just a preferences window where even my mother could indicate “always show scrollbars in Windows style” or “all text should be at minimum 14 points”.

tsimionescu11• 3 years ago

I don't understand why people keep bringing up the OS in this discussion. The OS doesn't have anythign to do with the look and feel of a web page, it's the browser that decides on a default look. And even for native apps, there is no "OS look and feel" - at least not on Linux or Windows. A Win32 button doesn't look exactly like a XAML button not like an MFC button, and definitely not like a UWP button. A Gnome button doesn't look like an XFce button, nor like a Plasma button.

Also, people like it this way! The OS is just a dumb layer that my hardware vendor is forcing on me. I care much more that Word works the same when I switch from a Dell laptop to an Apple one than some OS preference.

SPBS• 3 years ago

I hate articles like this because they present highly opinionated solutions as something definite even though it has a narrow focus on what the author cares about.

Whatever the author says about custom scrollbars isn't going to stop CSS-Tricks from styling their scrollbar. The article is perfectly fine because programmers are free to ignore it, and if this article convinces even one programmer to switch from a custom scrollbar to a non-customized scrollbar it's likely they never needed it anyway.

mfru3• 3 years ago

it convinced me, i am going to stop styling the scrollbar in my projects unless the designer throws a tantrum (and i cannot convince them not to)

theobr• 3 years ago

In the article, he has a CodePen embedded that would be UNUSABLE if it didn't have decent custom scroll bars. This post is so egregiously bad.

pmontra4• 3 years ago

I beg to disagree.

Actually at first, as I'm using my phone, I must say that Codepen mobile UX is great. There are three buttons on top that act as tabs. There are no visible scrollbars on phones, there are no visible scrollbars in Codepen. They either programmed that or conformed to the OS, the result is OK.

I switched to desktop mode to get the HTML and result views side by side. I have to horizontally scroll the page but that's to be expected on a narrow screen. There is no visible scrollbar but again, that could be because of the mobile OS. If I were on my laptop with a full screen window I wouldn't mind to have an always visible OS scrollbar at the right of the HTML editor. It's in the middle of the screen but I've got OS scrollbars in the middle of the screen any time I place an editor window to the left of my screen, so what's the problem?

pmontra4• 3 years ago

I don't want to sound to harsh, but my desktop environment and I know how we want our scrollbars to be and why. Web designers from thousands miles away do not.

Furthermore having the need to style scrollbars to make a UX work smells of bad UX design. Given a full screen page, is there really no space for the standard OS scrollbar (or my custom one,) which users see all day long every day they use their computer? Is the OS's UX really so bad that must be improved by a web app? It's wasted designer and developer time.

pyrale5• 3 years ago

Alright, I guess I'll go back to using js scrollbars instead /s

That'd be much better if you actually need a different behaviour.

Trying to bend the native scrollbar to your will is an exercise in pain.

bbrks• 3 years ago

One of my very first blog posts[1], which took off at the time on HN[2] was on this topic - in reaction to the trend of "horizontal page progress bars" (a.k.a. scroll bars!)

What's old is new again... and again... and again... :)

[1] https://bbrks.me/reinventing-scrollbars/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6246777

karaterobot2• 3 years ago

Scrollbars are part of the area of the browser that is outside your scope of concern.

No, they're actually in my scope of concern, that is the whole point of your article. The reason they were brought into my scope of concern is that a lot of people had a use case for styling custom scrollbars. I have a use case for it myself. If you're saying "don't abuse your ability as a developer and make inacessible websites" then yeah, okay. But taking options away from people because they might theoretically make bad moves with them is not a good strategy. If you took away every CSS attribute I could use to make inaccessible websites, we wouldn't have anything left. You'd be surprised what I can mess up. Better to teach people how to do it right and why.

kelnos3• 3 years ago

Taking all the flexibility away would be fantastic. I wish all webapps looked as close as possible to native apps, and couldn't style things like buttons.

barneygale• 3 years ago

Shoo. You're ruining the web!

Drew_• 3 years ago

Safari, Edge and Chrome don't style any HTML elements like their native counter parts.

sapling-ginger• 3 years ago

looked as close as possible to native apps

This is a meaningless statement, because even native apps don't "look like" native apps. No operating system has a universal style across all native apps, and some (Windows) aren't even internally consistent with the OS's apps.

stronglikedan• 3 years ago

I've never met a styled scrollbar that was better than those native to my OS, and that includes the ones imposed by any app, not just web apps. Even Edge is guilty.

karaterobot2• 3 years ago

That's a great argument for styling scollbars. If your OS has the best scrollbar, users in other OSs might appreciate being able to use it too.

RobotToaster• 3 years ago

Does firefox ignore this? The codepen example doesn't seem to work for me.

kibwen• 3 years ago

On the contrary, I'm completely in favor of custom CSS scrollbars because it's unimaginable that websites could do worse than modern OSes already do when it comes to scrollbars. If anyone here has a time machine, immediately after you've finished killing Hitler may I recommend that you gently persuade Jony Ive away from the terrible decision to make scrollbars hidden, low contrast, and impossibly thin.

the_other• 3 years ago

Personally, I like the Apple ones. I’m partially sighted, so I should probably want the stronger visual design, but I don’t.

What I prefer is consistency with the OS. My OS is my main tool for interacting with the digital realm. My life would be easier if the conventions were more evenly applied. Custom scrollbars concern me that my OS defaults are being overriden: will the field scroll at the expected speed; can I flick it and catch it as I’m used to; is the scale expressive of content size?

Custom scrollbars tell me that the developer doesn’t care about me, they care more about their brand manager and their pay check. This suggests the product they represent wont suit me.

Along with intrusive pop-ups, subscription overlays, and “we value your privacy”, it’s a clear sign I should not engage with that provder.

rektide• 3 years ago

There was a quick starburst trend around 2010 where super-fancy css componentry was being heavily explored & all sorts of interesting but not necessarily better stuff was being done, with radical redesigns. My mini-project submission for a job I got was using a super melted Geiger esque up-down button set.

I've tried to go back & find evidence of this era, to find more examples of these heavily glitzed up components. And wow, so much of this has disappeared entirely off the net. Maybe I'm lacking the right keywords. But this feels like a mega flash in the pan that came & went super fast.

meindnoch• 3 years ago

Like this?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fb5HJBFWQAIH09w.jpg

zokier• 3 years ago

How many of the arguments apply to any CSS styling?

minebreaker• 3 years ago

Isn't that why so many people love Firefox's reader mode?

defanor• 3 years ago

Indeed, I was just about to comment on the linked page overstyling fonts and colors while suggesting to avoid overstyling other elements. The title can be clipped to "Don't use custom CSS" while reusing the same justifications.

adamredwoods• 3 years ago

> Apple learned the lesson about visible scrollbars the hard way when it introduced its ultra-minimal, disappearing scrollbar indicators.
> There’s no visual indication that there’s more content present in this window—the only way to discover it is to scroll downwards. However, without an affordance to indicate the presence of additional offscreen content, the chances are low that someone will bother to check.

I appreciate the callout that Apple is an infringer on removing the scrollbars, which is a bad UI practice. For the entire lifespan of the web, overflow content indicators have been (aka scrollbars), for better or worse, an inherent function of the browser.

em_te• 3 years ago

Moreover, Google said they did a study when they first released their minimalist homepage design and when people saw lots of white space below the search bar, they assumed the page wasn't finished loading yet and more content was to come.

People were accustomed to long pages like Yahoo's homepage with lots of content below the search bar.

They solved it by adding a footer section with typical copyright text and people understood that the page was finished loading.

Aeolun• 3 years ago

You might be scoffing at the kilobytes this removal represents, but when it comes to web performance, every little bit counts

I read this, and I get a very good idea of what the rest of the post will contain.

chrsjxn• 3 years ago

The awesome thing is that this comes right after an example that uses about 200 characters...

I know we love to talk about optimizing web contents, but a single selector and a few hundred bytes (before minification and compression...) is not significant

robomc• 3 years ago

What would be nice would be some sort of solemn undertaking that the presence or absence of a browser scrollbar will never alter the placement of the content.

leeoniya• 3 years ago

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/scrollbar-g...

jmbwell• 3 years ago

I recognize that web developers want full control over the user experience, usually to the point of reimplementing all of the native UI widgets provided by the user’s OS.

As a user, I prefer for my OS to do things my OS does, including styling my widgets. My scrollbars, my scrolling behavior, window chrome, all of it… whether it’s good or bad or right or wrong, that’s between me and my OS.

As a user, I hate when web apps mess with scrolling. It breaks affordances I use, like tapping at the top of the screen to jump to the top of the page, or home/end keys on desktop. It is inevitably a worse experience than native scrolling, no matter how hard you try. Facebook mobile web for example is basically unusable right now because it’s trying to overthink scrolling. If Facebook can’t get it right, I’m not sure what makes anyone else think they can.

And why would anyone want to? Honestly! Microsoft and Apple have already done all that work.

As for scroll bars and other widgets, again, right or wrong, that’s not for some web site to mess with. Sorry if the developer doesn’t like the way it looks… they only have to deal with it while working on it. As a user, I am stuck with the developer’s choices, even if they override my own choices, which I’ve made in my OS, which is where those choices belong.

If you’re going to clobber native experience, I would argue, don’t do it unless there is absolutely no other option. Corollary: there is always another option.

eviks7• 3 years ago

Facebook isn't known for great design, so the fact they can't get it right tells us very little

Similarly with the MS/Apple - if they had already done all the work, they would allow you to force your scrollbar choice

Corollary: there is always another option

What's your other option to only show wide scrollbar in large documents since these are the only ones I actually need scrollbar in?

grishka2• 3 years ago

YouTube's custom scrollbars that take actual space on screen at all times annoyed me so much that I made a userscript that got rid of them. I made the choice to use overlay scrollbars, and I will enforce it if needed.

Buildstarted2• 3 years ago

Sorry but what's overlay scrollbars? (I found a few results but I'm not sure if they're the same thing you're talking about)

drpixie• 3 years ago

Absolutely! I know there are designers out there, obsessing over every last detail. But I want an easy to navigate, consistent experience. I don't want to wave the mouse around hoping to find the easter-egg that is a link. Or the almost (or actually) invisible scroll bar. Or the "button" that looks just like text. There is an existing, consistent, simple look - divert from that and you're at risk of my going elsewhere because you've ignored the #1 reason to be a web page ... I don't use it because it looks great, I go there to do something, and do it easily.

sfvisser• 3 years ago

I get the argument that fully custom scroll bars aren’t great for accessibility in many cases. However, the default behavior out of the browser or OS is pretty terrible in many cases as well.

Scroll bars popping in and out of existence awkwardly reflowing elements around it. Tiny unusable 30px wide horizontal scroll bars inside an input element because an element overflows 0.7px due to font size rounding issues or what not.

Default scroll bars are great for documents, but pretty terrible mostly for slightly more complicated UIs where a lot of info is displayed in small area.

Sakos2• 3 years ago

I recently discovered to my dismay that Firefox uses Windows 11's setting for whether to hide the scroll bar. And it's hidden by default. Though FF is happy to hide them by default on its own anyway. I can't imagine how this is a good thing for end users for whom computers are already unpredictable and difficult to understand. Modern UX is a nightmare.

tsimionescu11• 3 years ago

First of all, the OS does not style widgets, the browser does. And scrollbars are completely different in different browsers - they have different sizes, different behavior, different look-and-feels. So either you create versions of your app which match each browser individually, or you re-style the scrollbars to look the same as the rest of the app.

Thirdly, there is an obvious counter to your arguments that shows that one-size-fits-all design is not actually what users always want: games. You wouldn't expect a game to use the system look-and-feel, it rightfully uses a look-and-feel that matches the game itself.

And we can extend this observation further out: if your app is self-contained enough, and you have a distinctive enough style that your users like, then you should re-style everything away from the OS style to your specific unique look.

Should every app do this? Absolutely not. But is there no case outside gaming where an app should? Of course not.

pprotas• 3 years ago

MacOS and iOS scrollbars are the same in every app and browser. They are styled by the OS, even in iOS games.

pyrale5• 3 years ago

I believe the point is that if you're unhappy with the default scrollbar, you should get rid of it altogether rather than torture it into doing something it's not meant to do.

Having done e.g. an endless scroll application, the scrollbar was unfit for our use, no matter what we did. The right solution was to remove scrollbar and implement our own scrolling mechanism.

creshal• 3 years ago

And scrollbars are completely different in different browsers - they have different sizes, different behavior, different look-and-feels.

Yes, and? No matter what it is, it's what the users of said platform are used to. Is there really a benefit to forcing users to re-learn such a critical component?

You wouldn't expect a game to use the system look-and-feel, it rightfully uses a look-and-feel that matches the game itself.

1. Not everything is a game.

2. Depending on the game, system look&feel can be perfectly fine: SimCity 2000, Aurora, the Rule the Waves series, and probably loads of other simulation games all use it, because their art style doesn't require to re-invent the wheel poorly.

3. Games whose art style do need custom look&feel will most likely be using a fullscreen canvas/WebG(L|PU) widget anyway and will be able to use it regardless of CSS support of the feature.

berkes• 3 years ago

First of all, the OS does not style widgets, the browser does.

This goes beyond scrollbars. There are hundreds (thousands?) of libraries or entire frameworks to build consistent dropdowns. Even more to create date-pickers and to replace alert dialogs, add modals, and whatnot.

This shows that the browsers don't do a good job offering nice and neat UX on them. Same for scrollbars. Browsers offer native dropdowns (that more-or-less match your OS - depending on browser and OS), datepickers (that at least match your locale) and even native alert dialogs. And many are ugly as hell, have a terrible UX or integrate very poorly. IMO fair points. And often even reasons to replace the native widgets with tons of JS, CSS and dom manipulation. Edit: though I don't think this is the case for scrollbars, I think browsers do a good enough job there.

The one reason that I very much disagree with, it cross-browser or cross-platform consistency. No-one cares that widgets on your website or -app are the same on chrome/windows, icebeaver/weirdlinux and safari/OSX. Because no-one other than the webdeveloper and -designer will ever use them on all those platforms and expect everything to look the same on all these platforms.

chiefalchemist2• 3 years ago

And scrollbars are completely different in different browsers - they have different sizes, different behavior, different look-and-feels. So either you create versions of your app which match each browser individually, or you re-style the scrollbars to look the same as the rest of the app.

Find me a user that sez "This experience sucks...that's the native scrollbar" and I'll give you $100. If you give me $1 for every user who is fine with the native experience they are most comfortable with. If you give me $1000 for every time a custom scrollbar isn't accessible.

Fwiw, I've never visited a site with a custom scrollbar that didn't have other UI / UX issues. The fancy scrollbar didn't makeup for those.

p.s. Gaming is a different aesthetic, a different audience, etc. It's not what should be the user-centric internet.

criley2• 3 years ago

The "But games don't standardize the UI" is actually a worse argument than it appears on the surface. Since every game is re-inventing the wheel, they're all making inferior wheels. UX/accessibility is so far behind OS/web in full screen games that I'm impressed that disabled people can even play most games at all. It's not uncommon to boot up a brand new game in 2023 that has the menu design and UX consideration of a late 90s website.

no_time• 3 years ago

You wouldn't expect a game to use the system look-and-feel, it rightfully uses a look-and-feel that matches the game itself.

Oh yes I do.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2008100

Sophira2• 3 years ago

The difference is that games are a deliberate exercise in non-productivity. You are generally not trying to 'get something done' in a game except what the game itself is asking you to do.

When using a webpage, you generally are trying to 'get something done'.

Besides, games implementing their own widgets can be terrible for accessibility.

nailer3• 3 years ago

many native apps on mobile platforms don’t use scroll bars at all. Content simply extends off screen and more content can be pulled in.

bryanrasmussen• 3 years ago

Sorry if the developer doesn’t like the way it looks…

in my experience it is generally designers or business people who don't like it, the developer generally argues your line.

al_be_back2• 3 years ago

> Microsoft and Apple have already done all that work.

eg. Dark Mode - wasn't created by Browser or OS providers, but developers (as I understand), then OS/Browsers played catch-up. Developers can and sometimes do influence Design "upstream".

Sophira2• 3 years ago

The thing that I really don't get is that these designers must be users too. Would they be happy to use what they create? One assumes the answer would be yes, but I'm not sure.

paulddraper• 3 years ago

As a user, I hate when web apps mess with scrolling.

To be clear, this articles talks about styling only.

Tbh, if you like native features of scrollbars, widgets, etc., the most practical way you'll get to keep them in 2023 will be if they can be custom styled.

gatkinso• 3 years ago

I feel the same way about scroll-jacking and smooth scroll.

Sujeto2• 3 years ago

I have an application that looks terrible if I don't make the scrollbar transparent. I thought this was going to be about not using those horrible javascript scrollbar libraries, which make the code a lot more complex (I tried them all).

inetknght2• 3 years ago

I have an application that looks terrible if I don't make the scrollbar transparent.

You have an application that works terrible if you make the scrollbar transparent.

Transparent scrollbars are not intuitive.

Sujeto2• 3 years ago

There's a chat on the left side, right side shows media. If I allow scrollbars to render normally the whole site is split in 2, in the middle being a scrollbar, which looks bad especially if not overlay. I've considered not caring about it and just let the scrollbar, but it bothers me. It's my application anyway, the browser is not just a document reader anymore, it's an application framework (as well).

WirelessGigabit• 3 years ago

Also don't use buttons that don't show me the link I'm navigating to. If you must have a different style, style them around an `a href`, not a `button`.

And actions should be buttons, not links. I'm looking at all of those cookie websites with a 'link' that says 'Confirm choices' and a button that says 'Allow all'. Instinctively we go to the button, not the link.

Weirdly enough I responded on the Image send to Microsoft via MS Edge article about how even Microsoft, the writer of LOTS of documentation on how to make good UIs, abuses all these things.

Now, of course we could argue about how these things just visuals, but that's not completely true. Lots of screen readers depend on the semantics of the document structure to actually identify objects correctly. Button? Action, edit, sign up, delete, .... Something that actually changes something.

Link: navigation...

agos3• 3 years ago

aria roles solve that problem easily for screen readers, so you can use buttons for navigation and text links for actions without big issues

polydevil• 3 years ago

No, they don't. Aria roles are not for making one tag to work like another. (Otherwise what is the point of having different tags with different semantics?).

Aria is for making inaccessible html more accessible. Links can not be disabled (buttons can) - so they dont rely on js to work; Buttons rely on js (except for submitting the form). There is no way to interchange one with another without sacrificing usability.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

Scrollbars are frustrating to handle. Getting their actual size if you need to do stuff like compensate for a virtual table is really tedious. And Macs do them entirely different from everyone else, so that’s not nice either.

graycat• 3 years ago

Several billion people understand and make good use of the standard HTML scroll bars.

For any change, on the first day, only the programmer understands the new scroll bars.

For an Internet user who each month or so goes to dozens, maybe hundreds, of Web sites, all the new scroll bars are something new to learn likely particular to that site. So, for that user, a significant part of the Internet becomes dozens or even hundreds of times harder to use.

Same for standard HTML push buttons, links, check boxes, radio buttons, multi-line text boxes, single line text boxes (and the ones for passwords), etc.

Changes make the site obscure and significantly more work to use.

Web site owners: When I see a Web page with an obscure user interface, commonly I just do a single left click on the X in the upper right corner of the Web browser instance displaying that page.

Beyond an obscure user interface, often I can conclude that the Web site does not want me to see the content on their Web pages because they cover up the content with pop-up windows or expand and contract some header material at the top of the page, material that wastes limited vertical space on my screen.

Another problem is Web pages that follow my mouse pointer and respond to its position without my giving a click. Big interruption in using the site. Nearly always I'm just trying to bring the window to the top of the Z-order so, instead, have to swat like a dozen flying insects the various responses to the mouse click -- again, I do want to see the page and just want to bring it to the top of the Z-order.

Then there is Web site code making the window larger -- again it's like swatting flying insects. No, no, 1000 times no, with rare exceptions, I do NOT want any one page to hog my screen area. The reason is fundamental: In visiting the page, I'm trying to get something DONE, and that requires seeing at least two windows, maybe a few more than two. When one program takes up all or too much of the screen area, I can't see the other windows I need and, thus, can't get the work done.

There is an old remark that goes something like "Just because you could doesn't mean you should."-

denton-scratch• 3 years ago

Same for standard HTML push buttons, links, check boxes

Interesting that you mention checkboxes. For a long time native checkboxes on Linux (distro?) would come up impossibly tiny if you had a decent-sized screen. They were hard to hit accurately with a mouse, and impossible with a trackpad. That seems to have been cured now, but I don't know when it was fixed.

gwern2• 3 years ago

When you style things on the web, you get control over almost the entire experience. From ten thousand feet up, your scope of concern is this:

The mockup scrollbar looks nothing like scrollbars are now.

Do you need to make someone download that extra data? > Spoilers: you don’t. Scrollbars work without CSS.

No, they don't, because web browsers have been busy removing scrollbars as much as possible. As I type this, there is no scrollbar on my screen because Firefox no longer does that. For a moment, I thought maybe FF still showed at least 1 pixel of the scrollbar, but I scraped it off with my fingernail and it turned out to be a cat hair. The scrollbar appears only for like a second before 'helpfully' fading out, and is a few pixels wide (on a 4k portrait monitor where I'm not exactly hurting for space). Chromium still has a semi-reasonable scrollbar, but I can't vouch for the official Google Chrome. Safari and Mac OS/iOS have, of course, been years ahead of everyone else in the wonderful pro-user innovation of 'hiding scrollbars and making them a pixel wide if absolutely forced to display one'.

...This is why Apple introduced a preference to always show scroll bars...Windows followed this path blazed by Apple

Yes, a preference to go back to the old standard behavior, which in designer-speak means "we done f-ked up, but we hate real users and love the sleek minimalist appearance https://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/ more, so this is our way to get our users to shut up". And 'blazed', in this case, is 'lit on fire many decades of hard-earned UI experience'.

As an aside, I set the operating systems I use to always show scroll bars.

Which is why you should support custom CSS scollbars to negate browsers & OSes hiding them.

chrismorgan2• 3 years ago

As I type this, there is no scrollbar on my screen because Firefox no longer does that.

If you’re using Linux: blame GNOME for this; in GTK 3 and 4, they actively removed your ability to get non-overlay scrollbars without each individual app manually supporting the concept. So there’s no global switch or anything like on macOS or Windows. Firefox has a setting “Always show scrollbars”, but precious little other GTK software will support non-overlay scrollbars in any way.

gwern2• 3 years ago

The problem is, there are so many to blame. It's not just GNOME: it's Microsoft, and Apple, and GNOME, and... It can't be fixed by just one entity refusing to go with the flow; the flow is the problem. As long as there seems to be some sort of invisible consensus by designers worldwide that Scollbars Are Bad, the problem will spread and infiltrate systems, even ones which ostensibly default to scrollbars.

('A setting' is also not a fix but a copout as I already pointed out - you know >99% of users will never change it, especially on mobile. Whether open source or closed, maintainers are always the same when it comes to taking the hard path of fixing something's design or the easy path of saying 'you can set an option, CLOSED'.)

codeptualize2• 3 years ago

I agree with many points but there is definitely a need for custom scrollbars.

The reality is that if you have scrolling in the page (like a column layout for example), you kinda have to customize the scrollbars. If only to not break your layout as scrollbars are completely different everywhere, hidden, different widths, some ugly, some nice, no reliable way to detect the situation, it's a mess.

I would opt for more options: give us better tools to style (around) scrollbars, give us the tools to honor what the user prefers, to know when and when not to blend it in with the UI, to increase contrast, or to just leave it alone.

Just not customizing is not a realistic solution for a lot of situations.

lolinder• 3 years ago

Your UI really shouldn't be so unresponsive that the width of an element's scroll bar throws off your design. As for the aesthetics of the scroll bar: it might look ugly to you, but that's what the user expects their scroll bar to look like!

Designing well for web requires a bit of a paradigm shift compared to designing a print document or even a native app. You have to accept that you're going to be a guest in the user's browser, and that means you don't have control of everything. Failing to accept that just leads to frustration, but if you can embrace it and strive to be a good citizen of the user's browser, the resulting symbiosis can be beautiful in its own right!

codeptualize2• 3 years ago

but that's what the user expects their scroll bar to look like!

You base that on..? I’ve had users complain about their native scrollbars more than once. Native scrollbars can make things look very broken.

In terms of responsiveness, true for a normal website, but sometimes impossible in more complex ui elements (like I said, not the page scroll, but in page scrollable elements)

I would really like to see some research on this idea that people prefer native elements, it’s not what I see in user tests and the feedback I get. My experience is that people want a functioning app that doesn’t look broken.

My whole point is: we should be able to provide a great experience that’s accessible and allows the user to give their preferences (like prefers reduced motion).

presentation2• 3 years ago

One thing I didn’t expect was that for a large data table that allowed side scrolling, Windows users comfortable with Excel didn’t know that they could scroll side to side because the scroll bar fell below the fold. I ended up needing to measure the page to set the height of the table to make sure that the table wouldn’t be taller than the page. But what I really wanted was to sticky the scroll bar so that it was always visible, or to display it at the top of the table instead of the bottom.

I want to style scroll bars for this, not to make them prettier.

tsian2• 3 years ago

I did make a scrollbar that appeared to stick to the bottom of the table. I used a div with the same width as the table, used a scroll event listener to update the tables actual scroll position and only had it appear when the user was currently over a table and that table overlapped the bottom of the viewport. It worked well in the sense that people would use it without thinking about it.

derefr2• 3 years ago

That's not so much "styling the scroll bar"; that's "trying to tell the OS widget library's metrics-policy logic its business, because you know better than it does, because it's insufficiently smart."

If you think about it, a "smarter" OS widget library would always "float" scrollbars at the edge of the visible part of the viewport that the overflowing surface occupies. No configurability needed — it's just always better.

So why expose the ability to do that for certain scrollbars in CSS — rather than just making all scrollbars everywhere always do that?

presentation2• 3 years ago

That's cool and all, but until I have enough influence personally to dictate Microsoft's design, I don't really have a choice but to depend on web APIs to achieve the desired effect.

pmontra4• 3 years ago

Wouldn't the solution be to make the data table as wide as it needs to be and use the OS horizontal scrollbar to access the rightmost columns?

It probably breaks the right side of the page grid layout but if there are many columns to see, the ability to see them should grant an exception. I made that choice a few times with my customers. They wanted to see the data in those pages, as if they were in Excel.

bee_rider• 3 years ago

Is it possible to configure Firefox to ignore custom scroll bars? I haven’t noticed many at all.

IMO it is a dumb feature, but there’s no harm in having it in CSS for people who want it, as long as the rest of us can ignore it.

nawgz• 3 years ago

I mean, I use custom scrollbars so my apps look the same on each OS. Do you propose that I should instead accept windows making horrible ugly things that take up more space rather than just showing a minimal scroll bar?

Seems like a non issue to me. My users are much happier with the more minimalist scrolls I’ve implemented over windows stealing 30px per scrollbar

codedokode• 3 years ago

Modern disappearing scrollbars in Linux are an awful design:

- as scrollbar in browser disappears, I cannot see the position on the page and whether it is scrollable at all

- as scrollbar handle is very narrow, it is difficult to drag it

You might ask, why drag the scrollbar handle? Well, when you have tens thousands of lines in the terminal, it will take a long time to scroll it using touchpad or mouse wheel.

eviks7• 3 years ago

It's an awful design because it ignores one is the most important factors of scrolling - document length. But then having wide scroll bars in short documents where you'd never use them is also bad design

quickthrower24• 3 years ago

It is good design to have "wide-enough-for-long-doc" scrollbars in short documents for principle of least surprise.

mfru3• 3 years ago

for anyone wanting to change their scrollbars for firefox and gnome:

- in firefox there is an option to always show scrollbars (section "browsing")

- in gnome you can change the setting org/gnome/desktop/interface/overlay-scrolling to false (with i.e. dconf-editor)

darepublic• 3 years ago

I like the site csstricks.com but a while back I was disappointed to see they were customizing their scrollbar. It seemed really tacky and unappealing

chrismorgan2• 3 years ago

Modifying the scrollbar via CSS means the scrollbar will effectively disappear when a Forced Color mode theme is applied. Again, if you can’t see it, you won’t know it’s there.
Much like with Forced Colors Mode, custom CSS scrollbars will not honor the presence of an enabled Increased Contrast Mode.

These both just sound like browser bugs. In those modes, of course the browser should be ignoring or further modifying scrollbar colour changes.

MDN on scrollbar-color: “Note: @media (forced-colors: active) sets scrollbar-color to auto.” (However, I can’t find any spec citation for this, not in Media Queries Level 5 or CSS Scrollbars Styling Module Level 1.)

—⁂—

Here’s my take:

• Don’t use scrollbar-color on the document area, but treat this outermost scrollbar as browser chrome. In the early days of scrollbar-color it helped to set a suitable color-scheme setting in order to reliably get light or dark scrollbars as appropriate, but I don’t think any browser really needs that any longer (though it’s still a good idea, especially for other controls).

• It’s OK to use scrollbar-color on scroll areas within the document, so long as you maintain suitable contrast. Transparent tracks are a little risky, but at least acceptable in most inner scroll areas.

• On scrollbar-width, there’s a reason the values are `auto | thin | none`. As the spec says <https://w3c.github.io/csswg-drafts/css-scrollbars/#scrollbar...>: “The primary purpose of this property is not to allow authors to chose a particular scrollbar aesthetic for their pages, but to let them indicate for certain small or cramped elements of their pages that a smaller scrollbar would be desirable.” If you have a scrolling sidebar, for example, `scrollbar-width: thin` is completely reasonable. Other than that, there’s nothing useful to touch.

• Never use the older ::-webkit-scrollbar* pseudoelements (which are the only way to get things like 1px wide scrollbars, like the article speaks of). Their degree of control was a mistake <https://w3c.github.io/csswg-drafts/css-scrollbars/#out-of-sc...>, and their implementation never got beyond half-baked anyway, so that touching them at all harms scrollbar accessibility on at least Windows with non-overlay scrollbars (you lose the arrows at the ends).

• With all of these new scrollbar CSS properties, note how thoroughly they’re defined as hints. If certain accessibility modes make scrollbar tweaks break things, that’s very probably the browser’s fault. And it’s an unhappy situation when authors have to consider browser bugs (though it certainly does happen sometimes).

eviks7• 3 years ago

There’s no visual indication that there’s more content present in this window—the only way to discover it is to scroll downwards. However, without an affordance to indicate the presence of additional offscreen content, the chances are low that someone will bother to check. This is why Apple introduced a preference to always show scroll bars.

But the proper solution is to add the info/affordance in that specific instance instead of always wasting space even when you don't use the scroll bar. This would also allow you to have a more convenient wide scroll bar for when you actually need to use it (in very large documents/lists, though currently you can't setup your scroll bar to depend on that)

And here is the main problem with the article - this general approach blocks would block all UI innovation until some browser/OS vendor implemented something poorly (of course, this doesn't mean your implementation will be better, but someone else's will be)

pickingdinner• 3 years ago

I was under the impression "scrollbar = more to see" has been somewhat of a standard for a while now. The Mac example is just one of those classic UI fails.

The worst are the pages where the scroll wheel doesn't work, even when you can see the scrollbar just fine. I'm always baffled, since no simple page would have that problem. Clearly they developed it and didn't care for breaking it.

In html I would sometimes force the scrollbar to always show to prevent layout stuttering. But otherwise, changing the color of the scrollbar to match the fg and bg colors of the page shouldn't be too big of a deal. And I wouldn't mind if some browser skins would change the default scrollbar colors to match, either.

Scrollbars are already stylized across the web and across programs. Most users don't mind it. With options come the bad choices, which anyone can list on one page.

eviks7• 3 years ago

"scrollbar = more to see" has been somewhat of a standard for a while now.

That's not a great standard because it conflates conveying information with providing control.

001 px width is enough to convey isScrollable info, but makes it impossible to scroll

100 px width makes it easy to scroll, but is a waste of space to convey convey isScrollable info

TobyTheDog123• 3 years ago

Not to be an asshole, but --- well, I guess I'll be an asshole.

This is good, thoroughly-researched advice with just enough condescension that I walked away from it kinda wanting to style my own CSS scrollbars.

Additionally, there's a comment on this post replying to someone with "You'll live" which really isn't helping the case presented in the article.

I won't, I don't have a good reason to, but I had a nice nostalgia trip to w3schools: https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_custom_scrollbar.a...

quickthrower24• 3 years ago

Too much fun to be had, Streisand:

    body {
      scrollbar-color: #f16d4f #cccccc;

      &::-webkit-scrollbar {
        width: 13rem;
      }

      &::-webkit-scrollbar-track {
        background: #000;
      }

      &::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb {
        background-image: url("https://picsum.photos/200/200");
        background-repeat:none;
        height: 13rem;
        border-radius: 13rem;
      }
    }

nathias• 3 years ago

a website should be obvious to scroll without scrollbars

LinAGKar• 3 years ago

What's going on in that Finder video?

There’s no visual indication that there’s more content present in this window

Not only that. There is a clear indicator that there isn't more content, since the last row isn't filled. Only, there is, but one of the rows has randomly been truncated for some reason?

sharkbird2• 3 years ago

I largely agree, but the one thing I have been wanting to do sometimes is too be able to put marks/indicators on the scrollbar of where important pieces of information is in the flow.

A lot like chrome does when you use ctrl+f to search for a word.

LeonB2• 3 years ago

The OS gets the scrollbar wrong so often that as a user and developer I’ve found I need to take care of it.

It’s fine relying on the “platform” but the platforms are just criminal cartels holding users and apps hostage.

Two specific examples, just on scroll bars. I’ve found the platform failing to support dark mode and failing to support mixed high DPI scenarios. Both of these failings result in poor accessibility and real pain for real users.

As a lowly app developer I don’t have the resources to do it perfectly for my users. But the OS is failing badly enough that I end up having to do the work. It’s not out of vanity, which is the only reason TFA author can imagine.

naillo• 3 years ago

Making a custom scrollbar because it doesn't support dark mode is worse for accesibility overall. Your custom scrollbar likely won't work well with tools disabled used for scrolling that isn't the mouse.

LeonB2• 3 years ago

I am a user who uses accessibility tools and is stating that the operating system is failing in both the size and the tone of the scroll bar. Btw, trivialising dark mode is not cool. I have photosensitivity at times and when it’s bad the pain of items appearing bright coloured is excruciating. Just so you know. (Special shout out to platforms who flash a huge white rectangle before rendering the dark mode content. It’s like pins in each eye.)

The confidence with which you state “is worse for accessibility overall” is just breath taking.

Had you written “may be” instead of “is” and “in many circumstances” rather than “overall” - then I would understand that you were thinking about this.

But no you’re claiming perfect knowledge of a situation that you are not inside and which I am inside.

The operating system gets it very wrong in very many circumstances. I end up having to provide - configurable - alternatives to overcome some of the egregious mistakes.

If the operating systems start to get it right- awesome I can make the overrides opt in not opt out.

al_be_back2• 3 years ago

the OP mentioned apple's headaches with the "disappearing" scrollbar, yes I often experienced that in Apple's own site, iTunes Connect (manage App submissions, rejections/comments etc). Disappearing scrollbars on TextArea with large amounts of text made is very easy to miss whole paragraphs of text, can be very costly.

I'm for "Customizing the UI", as long as it helps the User get the most out of the site.

weird-eye-issue• 3 years ago

What about when you have scrollbars inside the "scope of concern" the author pointed out..

The sweeping statement in the title doesn't feel fully thought out even after the author ranted for over 3,000 words

dahwolf• 3 years ago

Another fun one is scroll-triggered animations, as one would commonly find on an Apple product detail page, as just an example.

The problem is that it assumes smooth scrolling input, typically a touchpad or a touch-only device. The experience completely breaks down into wild stuttering when scrolling with friction: mouse-wheel that scrolls with discrete steps or the classic "drag the scollbar" interaction.

Even when using smooth scrolling input it sucks, as you carefully need to time/verify your scroll speed as content appears/disappears based on force applied.

MrPatan2• 3 years ago

Custom scrollbars, as in "I'll hijack the scroll events and draw custom stuff on the side of the element" kind of custom, yeah, that's bad and buggy and annoying. Being able to style native scrollbars is a godsend which satisfies designers and brand people and prevents the first kind of custom scrollbars.

zelphirkalt3• 3 years ago

What is the point of satisfying a designer? If they design a product for a customer, then the focus should be on satisfying the customer. If they design a product for themselves to use, OK fine, go ahead. But their expectations should not be pushed onto everyone else.

A website is not a playground to try out ones figma crayons making ever more complex figma designs. One of the lessons in about every design course or degree is, that the medium plays an important role. Web design should care about being design for websites. By not caring about the actual website and merely caring about ones figma design, one neglects the medium. The result is a bad design. Instead the design needs to carefully weigh what is easily possible with the medium, functionality, and look and feel.

MrPatan2• 3 years ago

What's possible with the medium, whether you like it or not, is a lot.

I understand where you're coming from, but it's not where most users come from. Leaving scrollbars or whatever else unstyled and sticking out like a sore thumb tells those users "they can't be bothered to do it right, but everybody else does".

That's the designer's point.

If you want to go back to '94 websites so your scrollbars and drop-downs don't look out of place, good luck.

madsbuch• 3 years ago

Scrollbars are part of the area of the browser that is outside your scope of concern.

This is simply wrong. You might have a scrollbar in your content, which indeed is the scope of concern for the developer.

gureddio• 3 years ago

Someone re-writes this article every few years. It's not the first time that somebody has pointed out that customising the scrollbar isn't a great idea

ceving• 3 years ago

Don't use custom font sizes in your blog.

SilverBirch• 3 years ago

I agree with the overall point, but there's some bits here that are a little bit silly

You might be scoffing at the kilobytes this removal represents, but when it comes to web performance, every little bit counts

Go to Apple.com. Do you think that they value minimizing site size or do they prioritize the design first and then figure out how to make it performant? What this argument is really saying is that you should make the value judgement that performance vs quality should be somewhere towards the performance side, but I think plenty of people would make a different decision. You can argue that the scrollbar is extremely low value and therefore performance should be the priority but then... why are you writing an article about scrollbars?

scotty79• 3 years ago

Did he mention scrollbars in the content of the webpage? Or is it all only about single main scrollbar?

lofaszvanitt• 3 years ago

3000 word like article :DDDDDDDDDDDDDD

jmaker• 3 years ago

Fwiw, that huge font size doesn’t invite me to actually read the text. I’d rather have custom scroll bars than try to read when there literally are just three sentences that fit on my iPhone viewport.

mfru3• 3 years ago

from the very first text on the page:

"Updating in the open

Things might look a little janky for a bit, but that’s okay! I am in the process of refreshing the design."

bandie91• 3 years ago

"AppWeb" and "DocWeb" should be 2 different platforms.

kossTKR• 3 years ago

I don't know if it was Apple that pioneered the hidden scrollbars but it's extremely stupid and makes everyones lives using a computer much harder when navigating using the GUI, - before that there was always folder size indicator right there.

Can we get back to some actual human friendly interface guidelines please? I like both Apple and designers in large parts, but they've gotten too much influence.

Also extreme whitespace designs with scrolling hell.

Give us back GUI's with lots of content on screen, it may looks dense but is much easier to navigate, and can be pretty if you follow an engineering / power user ethos.

cebsoto• 3 years ago

Favorite line in this entire article....sums up the thought very nice and answers the "why" when I have to explain why modify components is not a good idea.

Ambiguity means less certainty about what the piece of UI is, how you interact with it, and what effects taking action on it will cause. The more you deviate, the more confusing things get.

htek• 3 years ago

If only this were a law. I can't stand when sites play "hide the scrollbar" or "find the hover sweet spot to display the scrollbar" and I click on where I think the scrollbar is and instead click on a link that's was two pixels away from where I thought I was clicking. How is this accessible? Edit: How does this improve the user experience?

hunter2_• 3 years ago

The author's main point is "When you override this expression, you’re indirectly communicating that someone’s personal preferences are less important than your own visual sensibilities" but that's always be the entire point of CSS. The browser comes with default styles, the user can override those, the website can override those overrides, and then extensions can override that. Granted, very few users probably do override the browser default styles due to those defaults rarely getting used anyway given the prevalence of websites doing so...

Also interesting that the author makes no mention of the ability for the site to set the color of the address bar area for Android browsers. Seems like the same gripe should be had.

Aside: I find it funny that the author says "This phenomenon is why checkboxes use squares and radio buttons use circles" and then links to a page for the reader to find out more, in which the prominent photo is of a radio with square pop-out buttons.

But a good read nonetheless.

butz• 3 years ago

Worst thing is when interaction with scrollbar is considered enough to enable video autoplay and another annoying features.

pgib• 3 years ago

Worse even than this is that Microsoft Sway implements its own custom _scrolling_!

captainpiggies• 3 years ago

I just wanted to say thank you. I didn't know about the setting to always show scrollbars on macOS and them being hidden by default was bothering me for a while.

Tagbert• 3 years ago

it does cause problems sometimes when there are embedded scrollable panels (that may not even scroll) where the scrollbars get in the way.

BeFlatXIII• 3 years ago

CSS scrollbars… those take me back to my middle school experimentations with HTML back when interactive web pages were called "dynamic HTML"

Dracula707• 3 years ago

so first about size is what 5 lines of css when most companies use react or any other framework. And every website has different theme, style, buttons, checkboxes so what let's don't use css at all then? and user can install extension that let them override css.

reboot81• 3 years ago

I need to follow in your footsteps and write why websites shouldn’t prevent autofill.

teel• 3 years ago

Funny to see this link here, just after I saw this site yesterday. I was forced to google how to disable custom scrollbars when I was reading the "A simple hash table in C" link from 2 days ago [1]. The site set the scrollbar width to 4 pixels which was so narrow I could just see it but couldn't grab it with mouse anymore. Totally unusable.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36302552

Don't use custom CSS scrollbars

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