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jacobgorm

I agree the scrollbar is dying and becoming unusable. A scroll bar needs to be:

- Wide, clearly visible and easy to hit.

- Proportional sized, indicating how much of the document is currently in view.

- Movable parts should have features indicating friction, as opposed to slippy-ness.

- With arrow buttons, placed together instead of at opposing ends.

- It should change colors to indicate hover and mouse press.

Of the classic scrollbars shown here https://scrollbars.matoseb.com/ , the Nextstep one comes closest to having it all and the Mac OS 8 is the overall prettiest. IMHO.

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All of this, with the addition that you should have the option of panning in both dimensions from a single toolbar widget if the document supports it. I've seen that implemented but never with the arrow buttons together rather than at opposite ends.

> - Wide, clearly visible and easy to hit.

Way back in the day, there used to be a field of study called Human Computer Interaction, where people would learn about things like Fitt's Law, and the fact that the edges of the screen were particularly valuable because they effectively had infinite size.

I am on OS X. For my sins, I have MS Teams open. It is hard aligned to the right of the screen. On the right edge of the window is a scroll bar. I shove my mouse to the right, I click to grab the scrollbar (which has conveniently expanded on mouse-over, and now extends to the edge pixels), and... the entire window gets dragged.

I don't know how we have ended up here. There was a period when people were actively researching what made good user interfaces, and it was feeding in to end user experiences, and it showed.

The Windows Start button is/was placed in the bottom left so users could just flick the cursor to the bottom left corner, no need for precise motor control. Could be moved to the top left or right as desired, too.

All that went away with Windows 11, though thankfully someone clearly had enough power to say "You are taking my bottom left Start button over my dead body.".

The Start button needed precise aim until Windows XP.

> Way back in the day, there used to be a field of study called Human Computer Interaction, where people would learn about things like Fitt's Law...

Which, despite the name, is not a law and should not be called such. I've had so many people claim that I'm wrong for disliking the global menu in MacOS because "Fitt's Law" says it's better. And yet, it's still less usable for me despite the claim that this "law" makes or what Apple's defenders say.

If people's subjective preference can be contrary to what Fitt observed, then it's not a law. A law is something that is true for everyone, it is not a matter of opinion. I have no doubt that this is a useful maxim, but it's not a law and I really wish it wasn't named so poorly.

The law is that the thing at the corner of the screen has the fastest seek time, because it has the largest available area. That's not subjective.

You might not agree with what is occupying that spot but that says nothing about the physiology of selecting it.

I certainly agree that the global menu, being almost never used day to day, is a stunningly pointless use of that space. It ought to have been handed over to foreground applications, exactly because of Fitt's Law.

With arrow buttons, placed together instead of at opposing ends.

Huh, I've never really thought about that but it does make sense to have them next to each other instead of at the opposite ends. Wonder why it's so rare to see that, apart from "it's always been this way".

I have to assume the natural question is then "which end?" If you put them at the top and the left of vertical and horizontal bars, they're inconveniently far apart when you want to pan different dimensions. If you put them bottom and right, it's very easy to move the window so they're off the screen entirely. But then that's a problem you have with split controls anyway. It feels like there is no good choice here, and split is on average least bad.

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