Why does Apple hate the scrollbar?

[jbotz]

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

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

[protastus]

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

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

[rocket_surgeron]

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

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

And now it seems silly.

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

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

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

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

[samemail88]

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

[MBCook]

I turn it back on too.

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

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

[sdflhasjd]

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

Even big, 'reputable' companies do this.

[hourago]

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

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

[ksaj]

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

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

[gumby]

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

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

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

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

[ksaj]

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

[jgalt212]

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

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

[wizofaus]

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

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

[samemail88]

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

[dt2m]

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

[xdennis]

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

[retrocryptid]

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

[_aavaa_]

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

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

[lapcat]

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

[samemail88]

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

[omar_alt]

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

[The5thElephant]

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

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

[nine_k]

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

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

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

[rahen]

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

They had scrollbars in the fifties?

[thfuran]

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

[david2ndaccount]

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

[layer8]

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