Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don’t want you to scroll! “Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time.
I’m a software engineer who does this for a living so I guess pretty disconnected
Yep. It’s called ‘tunnel vision’ and ‘projection.’
You need to understand that most people are not software engineers and solutions that seem appropriate for you may not be appropriate for them.
Try to think of a time when you weren’t so far down the computing rabbit hole and understand most people aren’t. You need to appeal to them if you want to design something well.
If you’re only appealing to software engineers and it’s not an application specific to software engineering, then you’re designing your product poorly.
Your comment just supports my assertion that users are expected to lower their standards to make developers’ jobs easier. It’s a backwards way of thinking, but this generation doesn’t really seem to understand what’s going on around them.
They’re routinely proud to lower their standards so others can have it easier.
Yeah but you should also understand that if design minded people really care about this they can make a difference. It’s not up to chrome and firefox it’s fully in the control of the designers who make the products you use. And the trend is to not have huge bars. My comment was more addressed to those people as I know there are a lot of them who frequent this site. Like myself.
And from my point of view it’s better for the browser to remain as design neutral as possible to allow creators more flexibility. There are a lot of use cases where huge scroll bars caused a all kinds of issues in the past. What we have now is a result of years of people arguing about this stuff.