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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

A gesture is an action. It's good, and it works as intended.

A scrollbar is (also) an indication, glanceable, not requiring any action.

If someone among your friends and family has an iOS device, remember how many times you had to show them that certain screens can be scrolled down? Oh, not just down, but also to the right? There used to be a few perfectly aligned views that had no indication whatsoever that there's more to them is you scroll.

Narrow but visible scrollbars would solve this easily.

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I know what a gesture is.

> If someone among your friends and family has an iOS device, remember how many times you had to show them that certain screens can be scrolled down?

I don't know, zero? Maybe let's say once to be charitable.

This is not a real problem faced by most people. IMO, this is just people being used to doing it another way.

Don’t underestimate how much pulling the rug out from under people via constant UI churn negatively affects their lives and interactions with computers. Leads to lower confidence, helplessness, etc.

I mean it's been basically one change to the scrollbar in 40 years. And you can turn them on again if you care.

On macOS at least, it's not one change, it's at least four:

- scrollbars overlaying the content, rather than having dedicated space

- scrollbars that auto-hide when not in use

- scrollbars that are initially narrow, then widen when you mouse-over

- removal of the scroll buttons

That's not including the visual design changes, which are arguably important too (e.g. the scroll "thumb" now has a very flat design rather than textured so it looks draggable).

Edit to add: oh yeah, one more I forgot: in classic Mac OS the scroll thumb had a fixed size, now it reflects the size of the viewport. That one is a useful and positive change, though. Not sure where that innovation came from but it wasn't the Mac.

That's all one change, because they redesigned it once! You can't just pick apart all the elements of the design to claim its multiple changes.

I agree the proportional scrollbar was good.

What? Of course you can. Multiple things were changed. That they were all lumped together in one update is meaningless.

I don’t have citations handy but I don’t think they changed it all at once. There might have a been a single major switch on macOS but I think all this stuff was developed incrementally on iOS.

Many changes are still many changes even if they happened at the same time. You can't just lump together all the changes to the design to claim its only one.

1 change to scroll bars. 1 change to something else. And so on.

You cannot restore the scroll bar width or buttons.

On the contrary, I've professionally seen even technical users get confused by their OS hiding the scroll bar, and them not realizing what they're looking for requires scrolling.

Frankly, it's broken behavior.

People literally did not know that you could scroll the share menu on some versions of android until they specifically added a "fold" to hide half an icon just so people realised that there was more options available. Hiding a scrollbar is so unnecessary. It's one of the best UI/UX elements ever created and people got it right so long ago

Then change the setting? It’s configurable in MacOS. “Always visible” or “Visible when scrolling”.

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