> When you style things on the web, you get control over almost the entire experience. From ten thousand feet up, your scope of concern is this:
The mockup scrollbar looks nothing like scrollbars are now.
> Do you need to make someone download that extra data?
>
> Spoilers: you don’t. Scrollbars work without CSS.
No, they don't, because web browsers have been busy removing scrollbars as much as possible. As I type this, there is no scrollbar on my screen because Firefox no longer does that. For a moment, I thought maybe FF still showed at least 1 pixel of the scrollbar, but I scraped it off with my fingernail and it turned out to be a cat hair. The scrollbar appears only for like a second before 'helpfully' fading out, and is a few pixels wide (on a 4k portrait monitor where I'm not exactly hurting for space). Chromium still has a semi-reasonable scrollbar, but I can't vouch for the official Google Chrome. Safari and Mac OS/iOS have, of course, been years ahead of everyone else in the wonderful pro-user innovation of 'hiding scrollbars and making them a pixel wide if absolutely forced to display one'.
> ...This is why Apple introduced a preference to always show scroll bars...Windows followed this path blazed by Apple
Yes, a preference to go back to the old standard behavior, which in designer-speak means "we done f-ked up, but we hate real users and love the sleek minimalist appearance https://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/ more, so this is our way to get our users to shut up". And 'blazed', in this case, is 'lit on fire many decades of hard-earned UI experience'.
> As an aside, I set the operating systems I use to always show scroll bars.
Which is why you should support custom CSS scollbars to negate browsers & OSes hiding them.
> As I type this, there is no scrollbar on my screen because Firefox no longer does that.
If you’re using Linux: blame GNOME for this; in GTK 3 and 4, they actively removed your ability to get non-overlay scrollbars without each individual app manually supporting the concept. So there’s no global switch or anything like on macOS or Windows. Firefox has a setting “Always show scrollbars”, but precious little other GTK software will support non-overlay scrollbars in any way.
The problem is, there are so many to blame. It's not just GNOME: it's Microsoft, and Apple, and GNOME, and... It can't be fixed by just one entity refusing to go with the flow; the flow is the problem. As long as there seems to be some sort of invisible consensus by designers worldwide that Scollbars Are Bad, the problem will spread and infiltrate systems, even ones which ostensibly default to scrollbars.
('A setting' is also not a fix but a copout as I already pointed out - you know >99% of users will never change it, especially on mobile. Whether open source or closed, maintainers are always the same when it comes to taking the hard path of fixing something's design or the easy path of saying 'you can set an option, CLOSED'.)
The mockup scrollbar looks nothing like scrollbars are now.
> Do you need to make someone download that extra data? > > Spoilers: you don’t. Scrollbars work without CSS.
No, they don't, because web browsers have been busy removing scrollbars as much as possible. As I type this, there is no scrollbar on my screen because Firefox no longer does that. For a moment, I thought maybe FF still showed at least 1 pixel of the scrollbar, but I scraped it off with my fingernail and it turned out to be a cat hair. The scrollbar appears only for like a second before 'helpfully' fading out, and is a few pixels wide (on a 4k portrait monitor where I'm not exactly hurting for space). Chromium still has a semi-reasonable scrollbar, but I can't vouch for the official Google Chrome. Safari and Mac OS/iOS have, of course, been years ahead of everyone else in the wonderful pro-user innovation of 'hiding scrollbars and making them a pixel wide if absolutely forced to display one'.
> ...This is why Apple introduced a preference to always show scroll bars...Windows followed this path blazed by Apple
Yes, a preference to go back to the old standard behavior, which in designer-speak means "we done f-ked up, but we hate real users and love the sleek minimalist appearance https://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/ more, so this is our way to get our users to shut up". And 'blazed', in this case, is 'lit on fire many decades of hard-earned UI experience'.
> As an aside, I set the operating systems I use to always show scroll bars.
Which is why you should support custom CSS scollbars to negate browsers & OSes hiding them.