Steven Levy on the Demise of the Scroll Bar (Wired Magazine, 2011-09-27)
https://www.wired.com/2011/09/reviews-levy-scrollbar/
>BEFITTING ITS FEARSOME name, Apple's new Lion operating system doesn't shy away from challenges. App organization has been radically reinvented and the workspace redesigned. But one change resonates with the force of history: Windows no longer sport the right-hand navigational element with the tablike "elevator" indicating one's place within a document. In other words, Apple has killed the scroll bar.
[...]
>The scroll bar's demise comes after a storied history. It was first implemented at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center as part of the Smalltalk operating environment that was installed on the lab's bitmapped computer systems. "I first saw it there around 1975," says Larry Tesler, then a PARC researcher. "There were no arrows—just a bar with an elevator. You clicked above or below it to move a chunk of text."
[...]
>It was a model that ruled for more than 30 years. But then came something even more natural—multitouch gestures. Apple was willing to transform its operating system to implement them. And so the scroll bar got eaten by a Lion.
iOS, OS X and The Death of the Scrollbar (GigaOm, 2011-05-04)
https://gigaom.com/2011/05/04/ios-os-x-and-the-death-of-the-...
>The scrollbar in OS X Lion does have an advantage in that it doesn’t take up as much space and visual weight in the interface. Gestures provide enough flexibility in control schemes that we don’t have to rely on a mouse click on the scrollbar control to move the viewport and a mouse click on the content to move the cursor. We have multiple ways to interact directly with the content. Content is highlighted before UI controls. What remains to be seen is if the change will prove as comfortable in practice as the theory might suggest.