Scrollbars are becoming a problem

That title bar thing, good god damn. I have to concentrate my vision on the title bar to place my fucking cursor between non-outlined active sections just to grab that motherfucker and shove it over. It is entirely a user experience regression. There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar. Easily moving a window by dragging the title bar was something that "just worked" for at least two decades if not three.

Maybe two-odd decades is about the time it takes for enough people to have forgotten the reasons and decide to just remove Chesterton's Fence[0] because, despite the fact that screen area is at an all time high, we still need to squeeze more shit in around the edges.

I've already whinged about both scroll bars[1].

I'll also whinge about "dead space" rarity on UIs like DevOps and Jira. "No, i want out of all contexts! Did I accidentally switch that slider by clicking like 10cm to the right of it?" (actual example from within DevOps right now).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37774322

Oh wow I thought the New Teams menu was an internal dog food thing for Microsoft employees. I’m so sorry, it’s absolutely maddening. Nobody likes Teams at Microsoft either, and many hours a week are wasted complaining about it.

> A lot of people working at Microsoft/Apple/Google are bad their jobs and should feel bad

That's the thing, I don't think they feel bad at all. Their UX departments exist solely to justify their own existence and are increasingly distant from the opinions and issues facing actual users using their products. They're still well paid, so they have no reason to feel bad.

I agree. The distro I am using lets me move windows by holding down Meta/Super key and left mouse button - anywhere in the window. Firefox is an example of how terrible it can get, see this screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/zs2wekv.png. To move this window I can either click to the left of the Firefox icon (to the left in image) or between the arrow down and minimize to the right.

Making things look pretty is very good for your portfolio and career. But making things usable usually means ugly.

Thin scrollbars and window borders are pretty. Mobile buttons with only icons but no text are pretty. Hiding functionality is pretty.

> I can’t move a window anymore without clicking around like an idiot to figure out what’s part of the title bar and what’s a button.

I don't know about MacOS and Windows nowadays but most linux/BSD window managers + Haiku allows one to move or resize a window using a keyboard shortcut so that you can do it regardless of where you put the cursor.

It is a must have to know because there is inevitably moments where you have a window showing at the wrong place. I remember back in the days I was using windows sometimes when switching from multiple screens to single screen a window would start/appear out of the frame so you'd have to move it using one of those shortcuts.

I would be surprised Microsoft and Apple have removed these. Someone to confirm?

> “Morons” is the right word

never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice

if they don't break things how can they fix them next year and add it as "new look UI"

>Every time I start “New Teams,” it asks me if I want to go back to Old Teams

Are you sure you’re not accidentally opening the old Teams application? When you update to new Teams it leaves the old version in place so you have both, and if you open Teams with the new shortcut/application you won’t get prompted to switch back.

Everything old is new again? I remember when people were deriding Windows XP for being "Fisher-Price" in appearance and preferring to run Windows 2000 because it was more stable (until roughly SP2 came out, which basically was an entirely new OS released as a service pack).

Windows 7, which was Vista's equivalent to SP2 also has some fans. Heck, I'd even personally argue that Windows ME has some niceties not seen in subsequent releases, particularly when combined with Active Desktop (which I'm pretty sure did not survive the transition to XP).

I wonder if/when some subset of users will prefer a more controlled window layout engine, one which always opens windows into their own "space" on the screen. To that end, I don't actually mind how iPad does its window layout, I just wish iPad had all the features and openness of macOS to install your own drivers, background apps and virtual devices/mixing. A simpler UI can actually be a good thing, but you shouldn't lose functionality when making things simpler. A simpler UI doesn't necessarily mean less complex operating system...

Windows 2000 was the last truly great Windows for me. It was the last Windows version that had a working "Find in File Contents" feature without having to install grepwin.

I swear they actually are actively trying to make the "Control Panel" / system settings experience worse with each iteration for sure. 90% of 10 and 11's system settings feel like they just took the original Control Panel screen and hid it, exposed 2-3 of the least valuable options, and displayed them in a weird solid-colored screen. To me the only way to adjust most windows settings is to find the "Advanced settings" link in the solid-colored window that will bring up the original control panels.

I absolutely agree. For at least 10 years now, my dream has been to essentially recreate the Windows 2000/XP UX as a Linux desktop environment.

That said, doing so would basically require creating everything from the ground up, because merely theming some existing toolkit and window manager to look like XP is not at all the point. And frankly, there HAVE been SOME useful UI/UX improvements in the past couple decades, like, FTA, minimaps. But can you imagine a much more conservative desktop, with highly integrated apps, based on the "good old days" of desktop design with just a touch of modern elements when they improve on things?

... Truth told, the closest thing in existence is probably SerenityOS... but it really would be more practical if there was a Linux desktop for this. Every so often I fantasize about how I might start such a project. It's been like that forever now.

I thought Windows 7 was pretty good.

Vista eliminated the Fisher Priceness of XP but added a whole bunch of glowing and reflective stuff, which Windows 7 toned down dramatically.

I don’t remember if Win 7 still allowed you to have the classic start menu, but I do believe I was ok with what it did have.

Win95 default was peak Windows UI for me. It had proper shading so you can see the window edges. Min/max/close buttons were high contrast and easy to see, and were big enough to easily click. Window titles were high contrast and clear. The UI was light and snappy unlike XP’s.

I might be getting old, too. (Born 1987.) I have also come to regard Windows XP as the pinnacle of personal computing UI. Almost everything that followed, regardless of vendor, feels like a step in the wrong direction.

I'd go up to Windows 7.

From Windows 95 to Windows 7, the UI fundamentally stayed the same, with a few details here and there, including, scroll bars, window title bars and borders.

Essentially, what changed is just cosmetic and mostly as a result of better hardware. Earlier versions of Windows were designed for 256 color displays, Windows XP fully embraced 24-bit color, and Windows 7 was designed with GPUs in mind. That's how we got from pixel art to shading to semi-transparency.

And I must admit I liked Windows 7 because it was both functional and pretty. A nice, modern for the time skin on top of tried and tested UI core concepts.

Windows 8 broke everything as an attempt to unify the desktop and mobile experience, and we haven't recovered since then. In fact, I think mobile killed desktop usability. We are in a conundrum that we didn't find a way to resolve: desktop and mobile are fundamentally different platforms, so they would need different UI paradigms, but there is an overlap functionality as many apps are present on both platforms, so it would be nice to provide the same experience on both.

To that, add the fact that the web is often third or a fourth option (mobile and desktop web), and the ability to use native controls in web browsers is rather poor, so people make their own, but then, you want the website to look like the desktop app. Same kind of problem.

> In UI terms they're both ignorant and opinionated.

These are the UX/UI cargo-cult morons you're looking for.

It seems in the software world we've yet to establish our own version of industrial design[1] so "regular" designers gets used. And leaders who decide aren't technical so they don't get usability.

I think the lack of competition also make the terrible designs seem successful.

I'm not using Teams because it looks great. I'm using it because my org uses it for chat and meetings. It's not like they let people try a few different looks for Teams and then see which people like the most.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design

> To me, the main culprits of crimes against usability are business leaders and marketers, not designers (although these do bear some of the blame). [...] However, when you explain the issues they often back down and create usable designs.

Honestly, my experience is the opposite. It is almost always designers who push for what they consider aesthetically pleasing with very little regard to usability.

Yes, when you push back a lot, you sometimes win. But it takes too much fighting, you need to be at powerful position to have the chance to win and they simply do not seem to care about usability.

This was one of the biggest powers of Mac OS X, before Electron became big.

Not many companies and people developed for Mac OS X, but the ones that did pretty strongly adhered to Apple’s design guidelines, partially because it just made dev live easier and partially because your application would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t.

At least the global menu still lives on macOS. I’m sad Gnome 3 didn’t pilfer it from Unity.

Flash invented tiny scroll bars

Man it was maddening when the window was taller than the screen and you couldn’t access the one box in the bottom corner to resize it.

That does make it easier to resize a window from the bottom left corner, which is indeed where you want to resize the window from in the majority of cases.

However, if you want to resize the window from the top or from the left, that does not help you much.

> *) The resize box used to sit below the very bottom of the vertical scrollbar, just below the down arrow button, as a distinct and dedicated handle for resizing windows.

At the intersection between the vertical and the horizontal scrollbar, if both were present. Or below them both, at the right end of the status bar, if the app has one (which many did, back in the day). Still there in f'rinstance Notepad++ 8.5.4, from June this year.

I recall a site that had progressive scrolling and some content in a footer I was trying to get to...

I hate this about the New Outlook, especially since I like to sort new messages to the bottom.

And if I go to a different folder and back I have to deal with it all over again.

Even better: automatic infinite scrolling. Wanna click on something in the footer, where useful contact details can typically be found? Ooops too late, it's gone!

Some sites do this and it's broken in that you have to scroll past it before it displays.

Breaks searching, too.

... Ya know, I haven't thought about that before, but screens are a lot brighter now aren't they. I wonder how much of the dark mode thing is just that the old good defaults are now eye-burningly bright, so of course people don't like them as much.

True. I use my screen with 0% brightness during the day and I have to reduce contrast during the night (which leads to reduced colour depth). Using dark mode is unavoidable for this reason.

Display manufacturers should really not just look at the maximum brightness but also the minimum.

> a lot of software "light mode" is just plain white. And screens been getting more and more powerful.

Yep. Without darkmode, my screens light up my neighbors fence like those Appalachian backyard streetlights.

( because powerpole streetlights were popular in rural backyards ref: https://assets.landandfarm.com/resizedimages/10000/0/h/80/1-... )

...with light light blue labeled data fields against a white background. Its nothing less than sadistic. Thanks Redmond, may I have another?

Yeah, I run my monitor at 20% brightness, unless for watching movies. Then I change to 50%. Wish it would had presets.

Anyway, I prefer the ever so slightly beige Interface of Windows 2000. Same contrast and GUI esthetics, but less drab grey.

I've been using dark themes whenever possible for a few years now, but recently realized much of unpleasantness of light mode comes for me from it being too blue w.r.t. the ambient lighting conditions. Playing with the slider in "Night Color" under KDE or "Night light" under Windows does the trick.

Not only that but it seems like color from icons has gone - now we get black and white ones. I'd get it if these companies making the UX were small, because yes its super hard to deal with accessibility and different color blindness but I agree - we've lost anything but the extremest of the extreme colors.

And when you finally have a along controls everything is overloaded.

Dish forced a new remote on us last time a device broke and they replaced it. It has far fewer buttons. I’m sure it helps getting familiar with it on a super basic level. But the old one wasn’t that complicated anyhow.

But here’s the kicker: there’s no fast forward or rewind buttons. There no stop button. No record button. All of these (and more) have been turned into menu items and/or secret chords on the remote.

Oh. And it has a mic on it too. Hard pass.

Tv remote is just the easy example. I see it all over the place. Sleek no longer is pretty to my eyes. If I see something that I have to interact with these days and it looks sleek, I see frustration.

Most plugins used in music software do take that approach. Where the plugin interfaces are modelled to look 'like hardware' in most cases, with nobs, sliders, all the things you'd expect on a hardware compressor / synth etc.

I like it.

It seems we are so amazingly primitive that we still think touch screens are a pretty neat idea for anything. But I’m sure analog controls will come back at some time in the future: First in really expensive cars, as expression of luxury. Only cheap cars will still have the cheap touch screens. Slowly, the old new way of interaction will trickle down to anything else. Like it went for the digital watch, ubiquitous for a short time, then a return to analog. Although those Casios seem to have a retro-retro comeback lately. I think even real keyboards might be a cool feature of future high-end smartphones.

This is actually one of the things I love about my Mini Cooper; they have cool physical toggle switches that feel like you're in a cockpit instead of the all-digital interfaces that feel like a coffee bar.

Yup. GNOME/GTK is a lost cause in my eyes. Literally worse UX than Windows.

The developers basically say "fuck you" if your use case does not perfectly align with their "vision".

There's also the consideration that a decent style sheet can be ~100 - 200 lines long. Yet I see ~5000 line css files that have so much custom formatting for JS frameworks that build everything with divs, rather than using semantic HTML5 which has accessibility baked in.

"don't theme my app" is not about users theming their apps, but instead against distros theming by default and more importantly the expectation that you could theme every app with a generic theme.

Arguably, Snow Leopard was peak interaction design. Just for the highly functional visual grouping of elements. (MacOS has drifted off from this quite a distance, since.)

Today in HN: A billion armchair rants about Windows 2000 being the best UI forgetting just how much it actually sucked at usability or accessibility features.

I use "dark" mode in Windows 11, but it turns the title bar a nice blue shade since I actually went and configured it (it's right next to the mode setting). I actually can't configure the color in "light" mode where it's always white if I recall, though.

The other criticisms are valid though, the last good Explorer UI was Windows 7.

Windows Phone was visually stunning. Thanks for reminding me of it!

I don't know what you mean about turning the window bar black. Did you set the theme to "high contrast"? I've used dark mode on windows since it became an OS feature and never had that problem.

Microsoft's UX has been poor since Win8, but not for graphical reasons. 10 and 11 look great out of the box - far better than any other OS I've seen, although tbf I haven't done much distro-hopping.

It seems like most people who scroll use touch, wheel, or other non-scroll-bar interfaces, and the scroll bars are just a visual indicator of document size and position while navigating it. I know I do— and have for 20 years unless I was using a shitty laptop without a scrolling input method. Maybe unless I'm scrolling through literally millions of lines of text, which is infrequent enough that I'd prefer to have them hidden and revealable by scrolling a bit.

Not having them take up screen real estate and working with most people's usage styles while being configurable for others is the right decision. The problem is systems and applications that don't let you configure them.

People talk about accessibility and their preferences like they are absolute truths— it's a lot more complex. Not having scroll bars sucks for people that never got comfortable with other scrolling input methods and people who use sight interfaces, for example. They couldn't possibly be less relevant to people who use screen readers, and as an input method rather than an Univision visual indicator, only slightly more relevant to people on phones and tablets. Phone and tablet usage has outpaced regular computer usage for quite some time, and that informs users interaction style. Adding visible UI elements adds cognitive load, and for people who never worked with scroll bars out of necessity, they're just another bulky animated distraction on the screen. Most younger users would probably think them about as useful as an always-visible on-screen keyboard.

I guarantee you— the designers at Apple who chose to hide those scroll bars probably thought more about scrolling more than every one of these commenters combined, and that was before they did formal usability studies.

I saw those fat candy looking aqua scrollbars in the linked article and I immediately thought how great OS X used to look and work. Truly sad the mess macOS is now.

Not getting it. I mean, if Mac OS lets you configure scroll bars (and I haven't noticed a problem with the defaults so far either) that's much much more than can be said about gnome isn't it? Where gnome theming has gone from black magic in v3 to ... anathema in v4.

> Yes, MacOS Has them set as "Only Show When Scrolling" by default, which is probably the most ridiculous setting.

I have used MacOS every day for 10 years and i've never, except in exceptional circumstances, used the scrollbar to scroll. I don't see anybody in my circle using it. They all have the "Only Show When Scrolling" setting on.

I don't think this is ridiculous and I would enable the setting if turned off by default.

I also spend 99% percent of my time in full-screen mode in safari, vscode or terminal. So the top bar is also hidden by default. I think this is much more focused.

I can, 100% say that I haven't used a scroll bar on the web in years. I do find the hidden scroll more aesthetically pleasing.

This is one thing Apple got right a veeeery long time ago. Every screen they have sold since like the mid 2000s, both integrated and standalone, has had auto brightness. I don’t understand why other manufacturers still can’t that right, to this day, no matter the price category. Even most non-Apple smartphones these days still suck at this.

> screens don't autoadjust their backlight

CRT monitors had easy dials to quickly adjust brightness and contrast. You almost did it automatically without thinking when you had developed the motor memory. Nowadays monitor controls are often fiddly and awkward. But I still use them to adjust brightness to the environment.

> there's not much of a good reason to hide them.

It looks nicer + you can just use the scroll wheel. A lot of the UI affordances lost over the last decade or two are unfortunate, but complaints about scroll bars seem to be purely baby duck syndrome.

Could you explain this point to me? I just checked and out of those two, it was _Firefox_ that has tiny, barely visible, vanishing scroll bars and _Chrome_ that has thick, well-visible, persistent ones. (And no, I didn't configure that on either)

The only thing that IMHO needs improvement in Chrome scroll bars is that the knob is light grey on lighter grey.

One useful thing you can enable in Chrome is tab bar scrolling. Without this setting the tab bar is broken by default, if you open too many tabs on it the bar will simply not show some of them because there's no room left, while all remaining ones are just a few pixels wide.

If it were restricted just to style abominations, that would be one thing. It's the sites — and the libraries — that hijack the native behaviour, changing the speed / acceleration / easing of the scroll that are the really bad offenders.

It's not just your eyes, we were using very different screen resolutions back then and UI was lot clunkier looking too. Having the option is nice, but being able to disable that is critical

about:config options are workarounds, not solutions. This is for two reasons: first, they can change or vanish at any time, as you point out. Second, they're not very discoverable. You generally have to be told about them to know they're there.

Does the suggestion in the article not work? There are few options in about:config for scrollbars so I'd look at the others too. If that doesn't work I'd bet https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ has a solution.

edit: https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/15kk98z/how_can... looks promising

> Scroll wheels and gestures are paging mechanisms, a scrollbar does that as well but it’s also a “take me to the middle of the document” control.

IME, only on Linux am I able to click on an arbitrary location beneath or atop the scrollbar and be taken there immediately. On Windows, it seems that clicking below the scrollbar is equivalent to scrolling down once. If you want to go all the way to the bottom of the document or webpage, you have to drag the scrollbar all the way down manually. I actually find it kind of annoying. I don't know about MacOS, as I haven't used it since I was a kid.

What's stopping those input methods from having a special scroll gesture that is optimal for their input medium? But sure, have an accessibility override for giant scrollbars.

I thinks that of all things, eye trackers and voice controllers have the easiest time sending whatever scrolling commands, without a need to fiddle with scrollbars.

Not just that "the document is bigger than the window" but the best scrollbars tell you, approximately, how tall the document is in relation to the window height! Proper scrollbars are, possibly, one of the best UI elements ever invented.

There are extensions for chrome and firefox[0] that can allow for continued scrolling by scroll wheel to exponentionally (as in, actually exponential) speed up. With this, I pretty much never use the scrollbar UI element as an input.

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromium-wheel-smo..., https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yass-we

On windows at least the middle button could be used to anchor a virtual scroll wheel or whatever that feature was a called. I’ve used it quite often on large content with small windows.

A gesture is an action. It's good, and it works as intended.

A scrollbar is (also) an indication, glanceable, not requiring any action.

If someone among your friends and family has an iOS device, remember how many times you had to show them that certain screens can be scrolled down? Oh, not just down, but also to the right? There used to be a few perfectly aligned views that had no indication whatsoever that there's more to them is you scroll.

Narrow but visible scrollbars would solve this easily.

What is the gesture for "let's go to page 196 of this 320 pages document"?

I use a mouse and a keyboard and an external monitor. Please don’t tell me about gestures since they’re absolutely useless to me.

Then you get programs having splits or panels or whatever they're called for multiple documents, which is just an internal window manager that's not as good as my regular window manager.

Relatedly, "i18n" is hard for non-native speakers to understand too, how ironically apt.

First time hearing the term a11y for me too. I hope to never come across it again.

This is so funny because I read the parent post, looked up "a11y", and then read your response. Had a pretty good laugh.

And educate himself just a tiny little bit? ;)

Then in his next web project, he just might use https://github.com/pa11y/pa11y and make the world a better place!

duuuuuude for real a11y? what kind of weird lingo flex is that?

I would hope (read: pray) that on HN a11y isn't jargon. On a thread about scrollbars (i.e., UI and UX) a11y should be as accessible as saying UI or UX.

That's like saying you shouldn't use slang because people have to look it up.

Laws to mandate accessibility, laws to mandate provable correctness, laws to mandate fairness, and laws to break up the big, for only the big could satisfy all the other laws.

I’m using Dark Reader extension on sites like that. It may sound absurd to do that, but it actually re-colors bs colorschemes and has quick settings for relative brightness, contrast and saturation, so you can tune it to acceptable levels. Without it my eyes bleed on dark toxic sites as much as yours. It also works good with syntax highlighting, because it uses “dynamic coloring” which guesses best color maps for every page.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...

I’m 30 and been this way since at least 19. I can’t stand most darkmode implementations because they often suck. Good ones are nice.

I love coding with white themes and full brightness. Never feel tired. Very lucky in that sense.

Wow, that's harsh; sorry to hear that.

I suppose you have already tried to decrease the brightness of your screen. Say, 400 nit at 100% brightness is searing, unless you're under sunlight.

I know that shadow text vision all too well. I find it helpful to lower the brightness when viewing text like that.

Or get in the habit of using the browsers reader mode. You can style it to your liking and it generally does a great job, at least for me in Firefox where I use it frequently

Biology. I’m in my 50s and get an eye exam every year. According to my optometrist my prescription has been stable for about a decade, but I can definitely tell the difference. My eyes do not focus very fast anymore, my eyes do not adjust going from a light space to a dark space or vice versa very fast anymore. I now have to hold books and my phone away from me to bring them into focus. Same with white text on dark backgrounds. I used to use dark themes for everything, but it just doesn’t work for me anymore. I’ve mentioned these to my optometrist and they say that it happens to everyone with age.

Not that old, but I have astigmatism. And every spot of light has a glow around it. Black on white is better because the characters only got thinner. But light characters on dark background is like having tiny projectors and the shapes are not recognizable at a glance.

I have astigmatism. Bright on dark renders with lens flares.

On a computer I can just use light mode and it’s fine. Driving at night … I really hate bright lights on tall SUVs.

Here’s an example of what it looks like (glasses help): https://beta-ctvnews-ca.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/beta.ctvnews....

The web says that astigmatism leads to glowing, blurry text when it is shown white on dark. The iris narrowing in bright conditions seems to reduce the effect, while the widened iris in low light seems to worsen it.

Dark letters on white background are objectively more legible, there’s research on that - unless the screen is trying to burn a hole in your eyes.

The Windows Start button is/was placed in the bottom left so users could just flick the cursor to the bottom left corner, no need for precise motor control. Could be moved to the top left or right as desired, too.

All that went away with Windows 11, though thankfully someone clearly had enough power to say "You are taking my bottom left Start button over my dead body.".

> Way back in the day, there used to be a field of study called Human Computer Interaction, where people would learn about things like Fitt's Law...

Which, despite the name, is not a law and should not be called such. I've had so many people claim that I'm wrong for disliking the global menu in MacOS because "Fitt's Law" says it's better. And yet, it's still less usable for me despite the claim that this "law" makes or what Apple's defenders say.

If people's subjective preference can be contrary to what Fitt observed, then it's not a law. A law is something that is true for everyone, it is not a matter of opinion. I have no doubt that this is a useful maxim, but it's not a law and I really wish it wasn't named so poorly.

I have to assume the natural question is then "which end?" If you put them at the top and the left of vertical and horizontal bars, they're inconveniently far apart when you want to pan different dimensions. If you put them bottom and right, it's very easy to move the window so they're off the screen entirely. But then that's a problem you have with split controls anyway. It feels like there is no good choice here, and split is on average least bad.

I think, it's also, instead of just approximating the position in the document, we now feel compelled to translate our mental image to a visual one and to match this with the rendering in the minimap. Which introduces an additional step of dis-abstraction, and what is essentially abstract (text) now has to be treated like a material object, as well. Moreover, if the overall structure isn't as varied as it may be the case with code, it doesn't provide much significance, anyways.

(It may depend on where you're located on the aphantasia to photographic memory continuum, though. I'm definitely closer to the former than to the latter extreme.)