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Comment by Teckla | Hacker News Reader

I'm finding skinny scroll bars increasingly hard to target, even with my mouse.

Honest question: Do you actually use scroll bars much? I can't remember the last time I actually clicked on one with a mouse.

If I'm on a desktop, then I use the mousewheel for incremental scrolling and home/end/page/up/down for faster scrolling.

If you have a long page and your looking for something "about this far down the page", there should be a TOC or a map.

On touch interfaces, it's just the side of the screen or standard scroll.

At this point, for me, a scroll bar is more an read only position indicator than an actual navigation tool.

Interested to see if I'm in a minority here.

Trackpad response on my HP Stream 11 is horrific. The only reliable way to scroll is to somehow get the touchpad to admit you are trying to scroll, so that the thin scroll bar appears, then move the mouse over to the scroll bar handle and click to drag it. Triple click to start a drag action also works, once you have the handle.

I love my little HP plastic laptop. It's a plastic toy I got for $85, including a Windows 10 Pro license, and I just toss it into my bag when I want to go somewhere. Perfectly adequate for text editing. Yesterday I had Visual Studio Code, web browser with 10 tabs, Ubuntu 19.10 via WSL, and Docker desktop all shambling along. I felt like Jason Bourne driving an attack Lada.

My other Win10 device is a ThinkPad x230. Its touchpad is also limited, but has three real hardware buttons.

Mostly I use similar aged MacBook Pro or iMac with Magic Touchpad. Totally different level of quality, no comparison really.

I always wondered why pro Windows laptop users in my family only used extra USB mouse devices. Ugh. I have yet to experience a mass market Windows laptop trackpad that most people would be able to use full time.

Trackpads are no longer a Windows vs Mac thing. On the Windows side, if the manufacturer implements Windows Precision Touchpad, the scrolling, gestures, and multitouch experience is (for the vast majority of users and manufacturers) excellent and near-Mac quality. If the manufacturer does not implement Precision Touchpad, then it's on them; their trackpad experience will suffer and will be closer to the terrible experience you have with your HP Stream 11.

I use my mousewheel the vast majority of the time, but it is not uncommon for me to use a scrollbar. In fact, I had to earlier today and remember being frustrated that I couldn't see it at first and that it was so small it was hard to click on.

It comes in quite useful when I need to move over a lot of space to find what I'm after. I'd be using the wheel on my mouse for quite some time otherwise.

We also use them as an indicator to realise there is something to scroll, in the first place?

Honest question: Do you actually use scroll bars much?

Yes, all the time.

Discord has that very thin user list scrollbar that is the same colour as the main background with only the little box being a shade-darker to even indicate there is a scrollbar at all.

Seriously annoying.

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