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Comment by bergie | Hacker News Reader

I can't remember when I actually used a scrollbar for scrolling. I instead scroll with two fingers on the trackpad, or with arrow keys.

So for me traditional scrollbars are a waste of space. But I still like to have an indication of where I am in the document, which is what almost every mobile platform out there does.

Here is an example how they redid scrollbars in latest Ubuntu: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/615

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I use the scroll bar all the time when I don't have my mouse.

How do you use a scrollbar without a mouse?

I use a trackpad and button to drag up and down on the scroll bar. I don't think the scroll on the trackpad is precise enough.

It's totally weird that I didn't even register the two devices as different hardware classes.

I can imagine instances where scrolling on a trackpad is more precise (webpages) and less precise (Photoshop?), but in reality, since the move to multitouch trackpads, two-finger scrolling has almost always felt significantly faster and more accurate.

I also use the three-finger swipe on scrollbars, regularly. Not all windows scroll properly. Still, the notion of clicking and dragging to scroll is really odd now.

On a Mac? Trackpad scrolling on all Windows laptops I tried always annoyed me but I never had any problems with two-finger-scrolling. It's nearly as precise as moving the mouse pointer. (The only problem is that you have two fingers on the trackpad, but Mac trackpads are not as tiny as so many PC counterparts.)

I always prefered page up/down and arrow keys to manipulate content long before I knew I was manipulating the content. Mousing is just to inefficient in most cases.

Now that you say that I just realised I use my arrow keys and pgup and pgdown keys a lot! I didn't think of them when I commented.

It's important to note that latest Ubuntu has completely fucked up the scrollbars. It would be nice if all apps actually used the new scrollbars, but only some of them do. Notable lacking the new scrollbars are such rarely used applications as Firefox and gnome-terminal.

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