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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

> Scrollbars are part of the area of the browser that is outside your scope of concern.

No, they're actually in my scope of concern, that is the whole point of your article. The reason they were brought into my scope of concern is that a lot of people had a use case for styling custom scrollbars. I have a use case for it myself. If you're saying "don't abuse your ability as a developer and make inacessible websites" then yeah, okay. But taking options away from people because they might theoretically make bad moves with them is not a good strategy. If you took away every CSS attribute I could use to make inaccessible websites, we wouldn't have anything left. You'd be surprised what I can mess up. Better to teach people how to do it right and why.

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Taking all the flexibility away would be fantastic. I wish all webapps looked as close as possible to native apps, and couldn't style things like buttons.

Shoo. You're ruining the web!

Safari, Edge and Chrome don't style any HTML elements like their native counter parts.

Which is part of what is being criticized. Say about Internet Explorer what you will, but it used native controls.

> looked as close as possible to native apps

This is a meaningless statement, because even native apps don't "look like" native apps. No operating system has a universal style across all native apps, and some (Windows) aren't even internally consistent with the OS's apps.

> no operating system has a universal style across all native apps

Imo, an app that isn’t using Cocoa (or carbon for older apps) widgets on macOS isn’t “native”. If you just use the default widget set on macOS, your app will have a consistent style with every other native app. If you use Qt, Swing, Electron, etc., your app will look out of place and break in ways that annoy at least some of your users.

there's more than twenty years of examples of macOS apps using Cocoa and Carbon and being inconsistent with the rest of the OS, iTunes being the most egregious

So that's an excuse to make things even more inconsistent?

I get your point, though; I'm a Linux desktop user, and have to contend with apps written using a variety of UI framework. For that reason, I tend to try to stick with GTK apps, as I prefer consistency. I have Qt set up to use/emulate GTK's theming as close as possible. No, it's not perfect, but most things on my desktop look pretty consistent.

Except webapps, of course! They break everything when it comes to consistency. I wish that wasn't the case.

I've never met a styled scrollbar that was better than those native to my OS, and that includes the ones imposed by any app, not just web apps. Even Edge is guilty.

That's a great argument for styling scollbars. If your OS has the best scrollbar, users in other OSs might appreciate being able to use it too.

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