Don't use custom CSS scrollbars(ericwbailey.website)
ericwbailey.website
Don't use custom CSS scrollbars
https://ericwbailey.website/published/dont-use-custom-css-scrollbars/
249 comments
First of all, the OS does not style widgets, the browser does. And scrollbars are completely different in different browsers - they have different sizes, different behavior, different look-and-feels. So either you create versions of your app which match each browser individually, or you re-style the scrollbars to look the same as the rest of the app.
Thirdly, there is an obvious counter to your arguments that shows that one-size-fits-all design is not actually what users always want: games. You wouldn't expect a game to use the system look-and-feel, it rightfully uses a look-and-feel that matches the game itself.
And we can extend this observation further out: if your app is self-contained enough, and you have a distinctive enough style that your users like, then you should re-style everything away from the OS style to your specific unique look.
Should every app do this? Absolutely not. But is there no case outside gaming where an app should? Of course not.
Thirdly, there is an obvious counter to your arguments that shows that one-size-fits-all design is not actually what users always want: games. You wouldn't expect a game to use the system look-and-feel, it rightfully uses a look-and-feel that matches the game itself.
And we can extend this observation further out: if your app is self-contained enough, and you have a distinctive enough style that your users like, then you should re-style everything away from the OS style to your specific unique look.
Should every app do this? Absolutely not. But is there no case outside gaming where an app should? Of course not.
> And scrollbars are completely different in different browsers - they have different sizes, different behavior, different look-and-feels.
Yes, and? No matter what it is, it's what the users of said platform are used to. Is there really a benefit to forcing users to re-learn such a critical component?
> You wouldn't expect a game to use the system look-and-feel, it rightfully uses a look-and-feel that matches the game itself.
1. Not everything is a game.
2. Depending on the game, system look&feel can be perfectly fine: SimCity 2000, Aurora, the Rule the Waves series, and probably loads of other simulation games all use it, because their art style doesn't require to re-invent the wheel poorly.
3. Games whose art style do need custom look&feel will most likely be using a fullscreen canvas/WebG(L|PU) widget anyway and will be able to use it regardless of CSS support of the feature.
Yes, and? No matter what it is, it's what the users of said platform are used to. Is there really a benefit to forcing users to re-learn such a critical component?
> You wouldn't expect a game to use the system look-and-feel, it rightfully uses a look-and-feel that matches the game itself.
1. Not everything is a game.
2. Depending on the game, system look&feel can be perfectly fine: SimCity 2000, Aurora, the Rule the Waves series, and probably loads of other simulation games all use it, because their art style doesn't require to re-invent the wheel poorly.
3. Games whose art style do need custom look&feel will most likely be using a fullscreen canvas/WebG(L|PU) widget anyway and will be able to use it regardless of CSS support of the feature.
My point was that a general "no app shall customize scrollbar look and feel" is wrong, as there are certain kinds of apps that do benefit from custom look and feel. Sure, not all games, but also games are not so entirely different from other kinds of apps.
Also, I thought the specific points about CSS and how to achieve custom styling if desired are irrelevant. The arguments I was replying to were about UX, not about details of how that is implemented.
Also, I thought the specific points about CSS and how to achieve custom styling if desired are irrelevant. The arguments I was replying to were about UX, not about details of how that is implemented.
> My point was that a general "no app shall customize scrollbar look and feel" is wrong, as there are certain kinds of apps that do benefit from custom look and feel. Sure, not all games, but also games are not so entirely different from other kinds of apps.
But the point is, that your website is not an app. At most it is a web app, and therefore governed by the browser and the user's preferences and choices for the browser.
A website (or website that is a "web app") should fundamentally be a different degree of commitment than installing an application into the user's system. There is a reason for browser sandboxes and for the browser to have its configuration. The browser itself is the actual app and the user should be in control of that, to govern a at least partially unified UX throughout the websites the user visits.
But the point is, that your website is not an app. At most it is a web app, and therefore governed by the browser and the user's preferences and choices for the browser.
A website (or website that is a "web app") should fundamentally be a different degree of commitment than installing an application into the user's system. There is a reason for browser sandboxes and for the browser to have its configuration. The browser itself is the actual app and the user should be in control of that, to govern a at least partially unified UX throughout the websites the user visits.
I don't see why there should be any distinction between apps and web apps in terms of UX constraints, and I don't think one has ever existed even since the invention of the Web. After all, Flash is older than JS and much of what people loved on the earlier Web was in fact made with Flash. Similarly, many famous Geocities sites were heavily customized to illustrate their creators' preference.
The web is much more than productivity focused software, and limiting it to some specific notion of dull uniformity in the names of consistency is honestly sad.
If I want to create a site to represent a detailed exploration and appreciation of the Voynich manuscript, why should I not try to style similarly to the original manuscript? Why should utility trump aesthetics for nay document on the web?
The web is much more than productivity focused software, and limiting it to some specific notion of dull uniformity in the names of consistency is honestly sad.
If I want to create a site to represent a detailed exploration and appreciation of the Voynich manuscript, why should I not try to style similarly to the original manuscript? Why should utility trump aesthetics for nay document on the web?
The real problem, in my opinion, is that too many websites do this sort of thing. Is there a place for it? Sure. But it should be something that is rarely done.
But I'm only talking about websites, not web apps. I don't use web apps, so have no opinion on them.
But I'm only talking about websites, not web apps. I don't use web apps, so have no opinion on them.
A website should fundamentally be a different degree of commitment than installing an application into the user's system
I agree with that, but this is opinion and not fact. There's a lot of money invested in blurring/obviating this distinction, exactly because installing a real app has more hurdles (both for the developer and for the user).
I agree with that, but this is opinion and not fact. There's a lot of money invested in blurring/obviating this distinction, exactly because installing a real app has more hurdles (both for the developer and for the user).
It's very hard to actually write good UX from scratch, particularly stuff like scrollbars that require all sorts of relative resizing, drag listeners, velocity methods, second and tertiary controls (keyboards, drag-selection of text) and often need to handle those things after a variety of user interactions without redrawing their content or slowing anything down by constantly remeasuring the rest of the UI.
Because it's difficult, it's often done poorly, which leads to people thinking it should never be done at all.
To your point about games, I find most custom-written scrollboxes in games to be pretty terrible, but we all kind of appreciate them just for their uniqueness, because as UX items they're generally not something you interact with that much. (Unless you're playing Crusader Kings, in which case ... )
I remember being disgusted and offended by Apple's app developer rules two decades ago, which included dictates such as never implementing your own UX elements like scrollbars. We're still debating whether they were wrong. As long as there are bad ways to build UX elements, some people will do them, and this will serve as proof for a few big companies that it should never be done.
Because it's difficult, it's often done poorly, which leads to people thinking it should never be done at all.
To your point about games, I find most custom-written scrollboxes in games to be pretty terrible, but we all kind of appreciate them just for their uniqueness, because as UX items they're generally not something you interact with that much. (Unless you're playing Crusader Kings, in which case ... )
I remember being disgusted and offended by Apple's app developer rules two decades ago, which included dictates such as never implementing your own UX elements like scrollbars. We're still debating whether they were wrong. As long as there are bad ways to build UX elements, some people will do them, and this will serve as proof for a few big companies that it should never be done.
You don't have to write good UX from scratch to get non-OS scrollbars, there are CSS rules that let you style scrollbars while keeping most system scrollbar features and accessibility.
No comment on whether or not that's a good idea, though.
No comment on whether or not that's a good idea, though.
I think in games reimplementing controls is done because of game engines having their own gaming-specific widgets or parts, which are not using the system's widgets themselves. Game creators will make use of the things available in the game engines.
Well like e.g. when I had to write UI elements into first iterations of Star Citizen, those were all in a 2D vector/sprite layer over the 3D world that had to be completely custom coded. Even the shape of the UI was pretty much completely open to interpretation. I have mad respect for people who write their own UI elements and "widgets" into games, given the restrictions that are often involved. Some do it better than others, but therein lies the art of observing and stealing from the best.
> First of all, the OS does not style widgets, the browser does.
This goes beyond scrollbars. There are hundreds (thousands?) of libraries or entire frameworks to build consistent dropdowns. Even more to create date-pickers and to replace alert dialogs, add modals, and whatnot.
This shows that the browsers don't do a good job offering nice and neat UX on them. Same for scrollbars. Browsers offer native dropdowns (that more-or-less match your OS - depending on browser and OS), datepickers (that at least match your locale) and even native alert dialogs. And many are ugly as hell, have a terrible UX or integrate very poorly. IMO fair points. And often even reasons to replace the native widgets with tons of JS, CSS and dom manipulation. Edit: though I don't think this is the case for scrollbars, I think browsers do a good enough job there.
The one reason that I very much disagree with, it cross-browser or cross-platform consistency. No-one cares that widgets on your website or -app are the same on chrome/windows, icebeaver/weirdlinux and safari/OSX. Because no-one other than the webdeveloper and -designer will ever use them on all those platforms and expect everything to look the same on all these platforms.
This goes beyond scrollbars. There are hundreds (thousands?) of libraries or entire frameworks to build consistent dropdowns. Even more to create date-pickers and to replace alert dialogs, add modals, and whatnot.
This shows that the browsers don't do a good job offering nice and neat UX on them. Same for scrollbars. Browsers offer native dropdowns (that more-or-less match your OS - depending on browser and OS), datepickers (that at least match your locale) and even native alert dialogs. And many are ugly as hell, have a terrible UX or integrate very poorly. IMO fair points. And often even reasons to replace the native widgets with tons of JS, CSS and dom manipulation. Edit: though I don't think this is the case for scrollbars, I think browsers do a good enough job there.
The one reason that I very much disagree with, it cross-browser or cross-platform consistency. No-one cares that widgets on your website or -app are the same on chrome/windows, icebeaver/weirdlinux and safari/OSX. Because no-one other than the webdeveloper and -designer will ever use them on all those platforms and expect everything to look the same on all these platforms.
> And scrollbars are completely different in different browsers - they have different sizes, different behavior, different look-and-feels. So either you create versions of your app which match each browser individually, or you re-style the scrollbars to look the same as the rest of the app.
Find me a user that sez "This experience sucks...that's the native scrollbar" and I'll give you $100. If you give me $1 for every user who is fine with the native experience they are most comfortable with. If you give me $1000 for every time a custom scrollbar isn't accessible.
Fwiw, I've never visited a site with a custom scrollbar that didn't have other UI / UX issues. The fancy scrollbar didn't makeup for those.
p.s. Gaming is a different aesthetic, a different audience, etc. It's not what should be the user-centric internet.
Find me a user that sez "This experience sucks...that's the native scrollbar" and I'll give you $100. If you give me $1 for every user who is fine with the native experience they are most comfortable with. If you give me $1000 for every time a custom scrollbar isn't accessible.
Fwiw, I've never visited a site with a custom scrollbar that didn't have other UI / UX issues. The fancy scrollbar didn't makeup for those.
p.s. Gaming is a different aesthetic, a different audience, etc. It's not what should be the user-centric internet.
> p.s. Gaming is a different aesthetic, a different audience, etc. It's not what should be the user-centric internet.
I don't think that games are an entirely different world from web apps. There is some amount of gradation between pure document-like pages at one extreme and games at the other, and a whole spectrum in between (say, an app like Google Earth probably doesn't need regular scroll bars to implement most of its scrolling behavior, while not being a game).
Also, I think users are quite observant of color clashes, and will notice if you have system-styled scroll bars in the middle of a web page that is styled in a specific way. I don't even understand how this is a controversial opinion - especially when we have things like dark mode that was available in numerous apps long before any OS or browser supported it natively - thus requiring the app to re-style all controls.
I don't think that games are an entirely different world from web apps. There is some amount of gradation between pure document-like pages at one extreme and games at the other, and a whole spectrum in between (say, an app like Google Earth probably doesn't need regular scroll bars to implement most of its scrolling behavior, while not being a game).
Also, I think users are quite observant of color clashes, and will notice if you have system-styled scroll bars in the middle of a web page that is styled in a specific way. I don't even understand how this is a controversial opinion - especially when we have things like dark mode that was available in numerous apps long before any OS or browser supported it natively - thus requiring the app to re-style all controls.
The technology is not the audience / culture.
The difference is that games are a deliberate exercise in non-productivity. You are generally not trying to 'get something done' in a game except what the game itself is asking you to do.
When using a webpage, you generally are trying to 'get something done'.
Besides, games implementing their own widgets can be terrible for accessibility.
When using a webpage, you generally are trying to 'get something done'.
Besides, games implementing their own widgets can be terrible for accessibility.
The majority of game menus are there to help you get something done. With some exceptions, games are not played inside their menus, and have the same kinds of UX concerns as any regular app.
The main difference between games and many other apps is that games are trying to sell you a fantasy, and look and feel are much more important to keeping you in the right mindset than in some other apps. But there are other apps and even web pages with similar goals which don't quite qualify as games.
The main difference between games and many other apps is that games are trying to sell you a fantasy, and look and feel are much more important to keeping you in the right mindset than in some other apps. But there are other apps and even web pages with similar goals which don't quite qualify as games.
>You wouldn't expect a game to use the system look-and-feel, it rightfully uses a look-and-feel that matches the game itself.
Oh yes I do.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2008100
Oh yes I do.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2008100
MacOS and iOS scrollbars are the same in every app and browser. They are styled by the OS, even in iOS games.
Perhaps, but MacOS and iOS are not the only OSs out there. Also, full screen iOS games have full control of the screen and I/O, and can choose to draw anything they want and implement any interaction they want, they don't have to rely on the system to draw widgets for them.
The "But games don't standardize the UI" is actually a worse argument than it appears on the surface. Since every game is re-inventing the wheel, they're all making inferior wheels. UX/accessibility is so far behind OS/web in full screen games that I'm impressed that disabled people can even play most games at all. It's not uncommon to boot up a brand new game in 2023 that has the menu design and UX consideration of a late 90s website.
I don't think most games would become compatible with a screen reader if their inventory system had a better scroll bar. You are right that game UIs tend to be well behind some common OS elements in terms of accessibility, and even low hanging fruit are sometimes missing, but it is also the case that many (most?) games are fundamentally incompatible with many disabilities and as such improvements in certain specific UX areas are low value. Doesn't excuse the fact that they should do better where it's possible, though.
I believe the point is that if you're unhappy with the default scrollbar, you should get rid of it altogether rather than torture it into doing something it's not meant to do.
Having done e.g. an endless scroll application, the scrollbar was unfit for our use, no matter what we did. The right solution was to remove scrollbar and implement our own scrolling mechanism.
Having done e.g. an endless scroll application, the scrollbar was unfit for our use, no matter what we did. The right solution was to remove scrollbar and implement our own scrolling mechanism.
Which is straight up what jmbwell was complaining about, as it breaks their workflow such as tapping on the top to scroll to the beginning and everything else they mentioned.
There is no beginning in the thing I was talking about. Which is why removing the scrollbar and breaking people's expectations in a way they can see/understand was better than trying to repurpose the scrollbar.
I appreciate this is off topic and not a solution but on iOS you can tap the hole on top of your screen to scroll to the top on any application.
Yes, that's one of the features that break with endless scroll bars, which was what this whole discussion was about.
It works for every single app that has endless scroll bars on my entire history of using iOS. Try it on Reddit for example.
It breaks more often than it doesn’t. Yes, the page “scrolls”, but it scrolls only a few pixels, while the internal “custom” scrolling implementation doesn’t respond to the event and does not scroll to top, resulting in a terrible UX.
When you scroll on reddit, there is a beginning and no end.
Some applications have neither a beginning nor an end, so scrolling to the beginning makes no sense. At best, you could make "scroll to the beginning" get back to the start of your navigation, but then your scrollbar wouldn't let you go further.
(also if you have both horizontal and vertical scrolling, you're still left with no horizontal options)
Some applications have neither a beginning nor an end, so scrolling to the beginning makes no sense. At best, you could make "scroll to the beginning" get back to the start of your navigation, but then your scrollbar wouldn't let you go further.
(also if you have both horizontal and vertical scrolling, you're still left with no horizontal options)
The GP was specifically complaining about apps not respecting their scrollbar choices. They said that apps should defer all scrolling UX to the OS, as that is what the user chose.
You're right, I misread that. Thanks.
Absolutely! I know there are designers out there, obsessing over every last detail. But I want an easy to navigate, consistent experience. I don't want to wave the mouse around hoping to find the easter-egg that is a link. Or the almost (or actually) invisible scroll bar. Or the "button" that looks just like text. There is an existing, consistent, simple look - divert from that and you're at risk of my going elsewhere because you've ignored the #1 reason to be a web page ... I don't use it because it looks great, I go there to do something, and do it easily.
I get the argument that fully custom scroll bars aren’t great for accessibility in many cases. However, the default behavior out of the browser or OS is pretty terrible in many cases as well.
Scroll bars popping in and out of existence awkwardly reflowing elements around it. Tiny unusable 30px wide horizontal scroll bars inside an input element because an element overflows 0.7px due to font size rounding issues or what not.
Default scroll bars are great for documents, but pretty terrible mostly for slightly more complicated UIs where a lot of info is displayed in small area.
Scroll bars popping in and out of existence awkwardly reflowing elements around it. Tiny unusable 30px wide horizontal scroll bars inside an input element because an element overflows 0.7px due to font size rounding issues or what not.
Default scroll bars are great for documents, but pretty terrible mostly for slightly more complicated UIs where a lot of info is displayed in small area.
I recently discovered to my dismay that Firefox uses Windows 11's setting for whether to hide the scroll bar. And it's hidden by default. Though FF is happy to hide them by default on its own anyway. I can't imagine how this is a good thing for end users for whom computers are already unpredictable and difficult to understand. Modern UX is a nightmare.
gtk has forced overlay scrollbars now. Its possible to enable normal scrollbars again with a flag right now, but for how long?
edit: they are removing the flag from gtk 4: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=790677#c6
gtk is effectively a gnome project now, and we all know gnome's attitude toward design and users.
edit: they are removing the flag from gtk 4: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=790677#c6
gtk is effectively a gnome project now, and we all know gnome's attitude toward design and users.
There's a lot to dislike in GTK 4. I'm hoping that it gets used by fewer applications.
>Sorry if the developer doesn’t like the way it looks…
in my experience it is generally designers or business people who don't like it, the developer generally argues your line.
in my experience it is generally designers or business people who don't like it, the developer generally argues your line.
YouTube's custom scrollbars that take actual space on screen at all times annoyed me so much that I made a userscript that got rid of them. I made the choice to use overlay scrollbars, and I will enforce it if needed.
Sorry but what's overlay scrollbars? (I found a few results but I'm not sure if they're the same thing you're talking about)
On macOS, when you use Apple input devices, the scrollbars work like on iOS and Android. They appear on top of the scrollable content when you start scrolling and disappear shortly after you stop. You can make them visible all the time, but then they will take up space like they do in e.g. Windows.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/mac-help/mchlp1225/mac
https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/mac-help/mchlp1225/mac
Not parent but probably this from GNOME https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues...
I disable them in settings. I want to see them all the time.
I disable them in settings. I want to see them all the time.
Ah, ok. Completely different from what I was thinking with regards to scrollbars/css. Thanks!
>> Microsoft and Apple have already done all that work.
eg. Dark Mode - wasn't created by Browser or OS providers, but developers (as I understand), then OS/Browsers played catch-up. Developers can and sometimes do influence Design "upstream".
eg. Dark Mode - wasn't created by Browser or OS providers, but developers (as I understand), then OS/Browsers played catch-up. Developers can and sometimes do influence Design "upstream".
> As a user, I hate when web apps mess with scrolling.
To be clear, this articles talks about styling only.
Tbh, if you like native features of scrollbars, widgets, etc., the most practical way you'll get to keep them in 2023 will be if they can be custom styled.
To be clear, this articles talks about styling only.
Tbh, if you like native features of scrollbars, widgets, etc., the most practical way you'll get to keep them in 2023 will be if they can be custom styled.
Facebook isn't known for great design, so the fact they can't get it right tells us very little
Similarly with the MS/Apple - if they had already done all the work, they would allow you to force your scrollbar choice
> Corollary: there is always another option
What's your other option to only show wide scrollbar in large documents since these are the only ones I actually need scrollbar in?
Similarly with the MS/Apple - if they had already done all the work, they would allow you to force your scrollbar choice
> Corollary: there is always another option
What's your other option to only show wide scrollbar in large documents since these are the only ones I actually need scrollbar in?
The thing that I really don't get is that these designers must be users too. Would they be happy to use what they create? One assumes the answer would be yes, but I'm not sure.
many native apps on mobile platforms don’t use scroll bars at all. Content simply extends off screen and more content can be pulled in.
> Don't use custom CSS scrollbars
Alright, I guess I'll go back to using js scrollbars instead /s
I hate articles like this because they present highly opinionated solutions as something definite even though it has a narrow focus on what the author cares about.
Web apps can be incredibly powerful and convenient, sometimes a scrollbar is in the middle of the page like with that codepen. In those situations, being able to style and control the width of the scrollbar is useful.
How about we hold developers accountable for their work instead of trying to ruin it for the rest of us because a minority do something badly.
Alright, I guess I'll go back to using js scrollbars instead /s
I hate articles like this because they present highly opinionated solutions as something definite even though it has a narrow focus on what the author cares about.
Web apps can be incredibly powerful and convenient, sometimes a scrollbar is in the middle of the page like with that codepen. In those situations, being able to style and control the width of the scrollbar is useful.
How about we hold developers accountable for their work instead of trying to ruin it for the rest of us because a minority do something badly.
> being able to style and control the width of the scrollbar is useful
No it's not. I have operating system wide settings for how scroll bars should work and the rules are complex with visibility and size of the scroll bar changing from one second to the next.
I expect my scroll bar settings to apply to all websites and they are significantly better than what codepen does.
Codepen also doesn't allow me to scroll past the beginning/end of the file, which feels jarring and just wrong with a touch scroll device.
And I'd bet it also falls apart with assistive technology for people who can't physically operate a mouse or trackpad, which in most countries is illegal. Why open yourself up to those issues?
No it's not. I have operating system wide settings for how scroll bars should work and the rules are complex with visibility and size of the scroll bar changing from one second to the next.
I expect my scroll bar settings to apply to all websites and they are significantly better than what codepen does.
Codepen also doesn't allow me to scroll past the beginning/end of the file, which feels jarring and just wrong with a touch scroll device.
And I'd bet it also falls apart with assistive technology for people who can't physically operate a mouse or trackpad, which in most countries is illegal. Why open yourself up to those issues?
> Codepen also doesn't allow me to scroll past the beginning/end of the file, which feels jarring and just wrong with a touch scroll device.
Stuff like this often happens because of a lack of native styling options. Can’t change the appearance of the scroll bar (for, yes, often dumb reasons)? OK then we’ll use a giant JS library that poorly replicates every aspect of scrolling.
At least with native scroll styling, ugly as it may be, you get native behaviours.
Stuff like this often happens because of a lack of native styling options. Can’t change the appearance of the scroll bar (for, yes, often dumb reasons)? OK then we’ll use a giant JS library that poorly replicates every aspect of scrolling.
At least with native scroll styling, ugly as it may be, you get native behaviours.
This doesn’t make any sense. The native behavior is what OP wants. No one needs to recreate the native behavior, it is already available
The person you're reacting to is making a distinction between a native (in the context of browser) scrollbar with the ability to change its presentational style (but not behavior) and a completely custom JS driven scrollbar with likely different behavior from the native experience.
> highly opinionated solutions as something definite even though it has a narrow focus on what the author cares about
Most users either don't have such strong opinions about their scroll bars, or would prefer it looks coherent with the application, or OS-native (your preference). But I can almost guarantee the larger group of non-technical users will have never thought about the styling of their scrollbars for more than a few seconds.
Also in terms of accessibility, so long as they're doing CSS-only changes, and the bar is sized compliant and has proper focus states, assistive technology won't care.
Most users either don't have such strong opinions about their scroll bars, or would prefer it looks coherent with the application, or OS-native (your preference). But I can almost guarantee the larger group of non-technical users will have never thought about the styling of their scrollbars for more than a few seconds.
Also in terms of accessibility, so long as they're doing CSS-only changes, and the bar is sized compliant and has proper focus states, assistive technology won't care.
But I can almost guarantee the larger group of non-technical users will have never thought about the styling of their scrollbars for more than a few seconds.
I think you're saying that this means it doesn't matter, but it actually increases the importance of respecting the users choices. Anyone who has changed their scrollbar has done so because it's important enough to them to bother. They've put effort in. That means there is far more likely to be a good reason not to override their preferred styling.
I think you're saying that this means it doesn't matter, but it actually increases the importance of respecting the users choices. Anyone who has changed their scrollbar has done so because it's important enough to them to bother. They've put effort in. That means there is far more likely to be a good reason not to override their preferred styling.
> But I can almost guarantee the larger group of non-technical users will have never thought about the styling of their scrollbars for more than a few seconds.
So you argument in favor of breaking the UIs of the non-technical users - who don't know that it is not their computer working wrong, but rather the site operator deliberately making things inaccessible - is users don't know that it is you breaking things? Sounds rather horrible.
So you argument in favor of breaking the UIs of the non-technical users - who don't know that it is not their computer working wrong, but rather the site operator deliberately making things inaccessible - is users don't know that it is you breaking things? Sounds rather horrible.
> Also in terms of accessibility, so long as they're doing CSS-only changes, and the bar is sized compliant and has proper focus states, assistive technology won't care.
Eh, it depends on your audience. My father has very poor eyesight. He doesn't use any assistive tools (e.g. screen readers or magnifiers), but he does need his computer-reading glasses. Accessibility isn't just ADA compliance and/or screen reader support.
Eh, it depends on your audience. My father has very poor eyesight. He doesn't use any assistive tools (e.g. screen readers or magnifiers), but he does need his computer-reading glasses. Accessibility isn't just ADA compliance and/or screen reader support.
Same argument for why we should use tabs over space when accessibility seems squarely focused on the blind and screen readers when visual impairment is a broad spectrum. My eyesight isn’t ‘bad’, but it isn’t what it used to be and with so many code bases using 2-space indentation, I wonder why this isn’t configurable as I have a lot of difficulty discerning the contrast when it’s so shallow.
They won't care as long as it's consistent. The only way for it to be consistent is for people not to touch it.
Just because most users don't think about it doesn't mean it doesn't impact them and that they should be ignored. The very fact that they can't fight for the solution that best benefits them means the onus is on us as designers and programmers to do that for them, instead of handwaving their needs away.
Considering the trend now is to straight up remove scroll bars (why the fuck...), I expect conversations like this will become moot in the not so distant future.
Or to phrase it a different way: Being able to style and control the width of the scrollbar is so incredibly useful that it must be in the hands of users, and not designers.
Would you extend that to buttons, text fields and all other components in general?
I'd say default should be whatever the web designer wanted, if you're not agree you can always use one of the overrider plugins.
I'd say default should be whatever the web designer wanted, if you're not agree you can always use one of the overrider plugins.
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Yes 100%, apps should follow the theme for components set by the user.
I would go even further: websites should not be the ultimate decider on any style-related decision. Including colors, font faces, text size, margins, padding, content width, and any other UI elements. Website should be able to suggest these things, but browsers should default to the user’s preference or the system’s configuration. The user should have the final say on how the User Agent displays HTML content.
Browsers have ceded far too much control over these things to websites, to the point where we are even debating whether they should style such fundamental OS controls as scroll bars!
Browsers have ceded far too much control over these things to websites, to the point where we are even debating whether they should style such fundamental OS controls as scroll bars!
It's relatively easy to force your custom stylesheets to any website. Whether it will work at all is another question.
I believe what you suggest could work only with semantic HTML without any advanced styling - no floating elements, no flexbox/grid, no absolute/relative positioning etc. This then means return to static text based websites which is fine for many use cases, but not for all.
Ideally, rich web apps which actually need all the CSS/APIs could use them, while the text-based sites would keep custom styling/JS to minimum (which would allow reasonable user-defined styling). But it's impossible to force this dichotomy in practice.
I believe what you suggest could work only with semantic HTML without any advanced styling - no floating elements, no flexbox/grid, no absolute/relative positioning etc. This then means return to static text based websites which is fine for many use cases, but not for all.
Ideally, rich web apps which actually need all the CSS/APIs could use them, while the text-based sites would keep custom styling/JS to minimum (which would allow reasonable user-defined styling). But it's impossible to force this dichotomy in practice.
1991 called, they want their Gopher back.
Overriding all css is so popular a concept that no Firefox plugin to do that has more than 100k downloads (and firefox users are probably the most likely to fidget with things like that).
A radical idea - people should be able to create whatever they want in whatever colours and fonts they want and have it shown to viewers the way they want, at least unless the viewer explicitly objects.
Overriding all css is so popular a concept that no Firefox plugin to do that has more than 100k downloads (and firefox users are probably the most likely to fidget with things like that).
A radical idea - people should be able to create whatever they want in whatever colours and fonts they want and have it shown to viewers the way they want, at least unless the viewer explicitly objects.
Would you then also force developers to stick with the very limited set of native components, or are they allowed to make custom ones?
They can make custom ones when a native one doesn't exist.
There's literally no reason to write your own implementation of a drop-down menu. Zero. None.
And yet, I occasionally run into a site where I need to enter my mailing address, and they have a drop-down menu to choose my state. In a native component, I can just tab to it, type "or", and Oregon (or OR if they're using the abbreviation) will be chosen, and I can just tab on to the next input field.
But every now and then, I find myself on a form where that doesn't work. It turns out, what looks like a drop-down menu is actually a fancy div, and when you click on it, another div pops up with divs for each item. Oh, but I can't even use my keyboard to choose an option! I HAVE to click!
WHY DO WEB DEVS DO THIS!? What was gained by this? Someone spent time to reimplement something for absolutely zero gain, and a LOT of loss! WHY!?
And my complaints don't even begin to address how the custom solution is probably awful for accessibility.
You don't need to make a custom button.
You don't need a custom date picker.
I'm struggling to think what custom components you think need to be made.
There's literally no reason to write your own implementation of a drop-down menu. Zero. None.
And yet, I occasionally run into a site where I need to enter my mailing address, and they have a drop-down menu to choose my state. In a native component, I can just tab to it, type "or", and Oregon (or OR if they're using the abbreviation) will be chosen, and I can just tab on to the next input field.
But every now and then, I find myself on a form where that doesn't work. It turns out, what looks like a drop-down menu is actually a fancy div, and when you click on it, another div pops up with divs for each item. Oh, but I can't even use my keyboard to choose an option! I HAVE to click!
WHY DO WEB DEVS DO THIS!? What was gained by this? Someone spent time to reimplement something for absolutely zero gain, and a LOT of loss! WHY!?
And my complaints don't even begin to address how the custom solution is probably awful for accessibility.
You don't need to make a custom button.
You don't need a custom date picker.
I'm struggling to think what custom components you think need to be made.
My best guess is that these abominations are made in order to adhere to some pre-made design that specified all the visual aspects without regard for the existing technology. If somebody gives you an export of a design made in Photoshop and says that you need to match it pixel for pixel, that design might not be readily implementable. Depending on the approvals needed, or the cost of hiring external designers, asking them to revisit the design in order to match the tech stack might be politically infeasible.
So instead of design being the intersection of form and function, design becomes entirely detached from the function.
So instead of design being the intersection of form and function, design becomes entirely detached from the function.
They can use CSS to change the design.
It does not require the developer to completely rebuild the component behavior from scratch using JavaScript.
It does not require the developer to completely rebuild the component behavior from scratch using JavaScript.
Lets say a date picker was not supported in html, I'd at least prefer they made one aggregating native buttons instead of from scratch with colored divs/whatever.
Well, that's a super minority opinion. Also, websites are not apps.
The same applies to most websites too
Good thing CSS is client side!
Interesting setup, do you have a link to it?
> being able to style and control the width of the scrollbar is useful.
Useful for who? I set my scrollbar width fairly wide intentionally so I can actually click on the thing and use it without too much effort. Some developers thing it's "useful" if I'm not able to do that by setting a significantly smaller width, which is not useful at all for me because every single time it makes the experience worse.
In some fairness, the fault is also with Firefox and Chrome for not being able to just say "never style scrollbars" like you could with Opera in 2000. Sigh...
Useful for who? I set my scrollbar width fairly wide intentionally so I can actually click on the thing and use it without too much effort. Some developers thing it's "useful" if I'm not able to do that by setting a significantly smaller width, which is not useful at all for me because every single time it makes the experience worse.
In some fairness, the fault is also with Firefox and Chrome for not being able to just say "never style scrollbars" like you could with Opera in 2000. Sigh...
For control-freaks who think they are the second coming of WinAmp and like to micromanage every single aspect of user experience so that it conform to THE BRAND®™.
> I hate articles like this because they present highly opinionated solutions as something definite
The first paragraph says "I feel this is a mistake". The author is very clearly expressing an opinion, not a fact. They go on to attempt to justify their opinion. I feel like you're railing against something that... isn't really happening here.
I will grant you that there are some very narrowly-defined situations where styling a scrollbar is useful and actually gives a better experience. But in general, leave them alone. They are browser chrome, and should not be touched by webpages themselves.
The first paragraph says "I feel this is a mistake". The author is very clearly expressing an opinion, not a fact. They go on to attempt to justify their opinion. I feel like you're railing against something that... isn't really happening here.
I will grant you that there are some very narrowly-defined situations where styling a scrollbar is useful and actually gives a better experience. But in general, leave them alone. They are browser chrome, and should not be touched by webpages themselves.
I don't want to sound to harsh, but my desktop environment and I know how we want our scrollbars to be and why. Web designers from thousands miles away do not.
Furthermore having the need to style scrollbars to make a UX work smells of bad UX design. Given a full screen page, is there really no space for the standard OS scrollbar (or my custom one,) which users see all day long every day they use their computer? Is the OS's UX really so bad that must be improved by a web app? It's wasted designer and developer time.
Furthermore having the need to style scrollbars to make a UX work smells of bad UX design. Given a full screen page, is there really no space for the standard OS scrollbar (or my custom one,) which users see all day long every day they use their computer? Is the OS's UX really so bad that must be improved by a web app? It's wasted designer and developer time.
> I hate articles like this because they present highly opinionated solutions as something definite even though it has a narrow focus on what the author cares about.
Whatever the author says about custom scrollbars isn't going to stop CSS-Tricks from styling their scrollbar. The article is perfectly fine because programmers are free to ignore it, and if this article convinces even one programmer to switch from a custom scrollbar to a non-customized scrollbar it's likely they never needed it anyway.
Whatever the author says about custom scrollbars isn't going to stop CSS-Tricks from styling their scrollbar. The article is perfectly fine because programmers are free to ignore it, and if this article convinces even one programmer to switch from a custom scrollbar to a non-customized scrollbar it's likely they never needed it anyway.
it convinced me, i am going to stop styling the scrollbar in my projects unless the designer throws a tantrum (and i cannot convince them not to)
There should be simple OS level overrides on CSS. Not a user stylesheets or extensions or hard to find a browser flag, just a preferences window where even my mother could indicate “always show scrollbars in Windows style” or “all text should be at minimum 14 points”.
I don't understand why people keep bringing up the OS in this discussion. The OS doesn't have anythign to do with the look and feel of a web page, it's the browser that decides on a default look. And even for native apps, there is no "OS look and feel" - at least not on Linux or Windows. A Win32 button doesn't look exactly like a XAML button not like an MFC button, and definitely not like a UWP button. A Gnome button doesn't look like an XFce button, nor like a Plasma button.
Also, people like it this way! The OS is just a dumb layer that my hardware vendor is forcing on me. I care much more that Word works the same when I switch from a Dell laptop to an Apple one than some OS preference.
Also, people like it this way! The OS is just a dumb layer that my hardware vendor is forcing on me. I care much more that Word works the same when I switch from a Dell laptop to an Apple one than some OS preference.
So to be sure, you’d like your Word on Mac to also have a “close window” button as a square “X” on the top right instead of a red circle on the top left?
OS’s are not always 100% internally consistent but every OS vendor is striving towards that.
Finally I agree that the OS should not natively style a web page (although as I said I’m in favor of user overrides). A scroll bar is not a web page. It’s an OS level interface element.
OS’s are not always 100% internally consistent but every OS vendor is striving towards that.
Finally I agree that the OS should not natively style a web page (although as I said I’m in favor of user overrides). A scroll bar is not a web page. It’s an OS level interface element.
Well, probably not, though even that is debatable (think of the game example). Still, I think the window control elements are pretty close to something the OS should fully control.
On the other hand, I would expect it to use the Ribbon for interaction, and mostly ignore the MacOS global menu bar, so I can still find things where I'm used to them.
Having said all that, scrollbars appear all the time inside other elements of an app, so I don't see why they should be compared to the window close button. If they're smack dab in the middle of my screen, they should look like the rest of the app.
On the other hand, I would expect it to use the Ribbon for interaction, and mostly ignore the MacOS global menu bar, so I can still find things where I'm used to them.
Having said all that, scrollbars appear all the time inside other elements of an app, so I don't see why they should be compared to the window close button. If they're smack dab in the middle of my screen, they should look like the rest of the app.
fwiw, I have enabled "always show scrollbars" on macOS, and I frequently use them on my iPhone too.
One of the most frustrating thing on the web is capturing any scrolling behavior, or catching conflicting keystrokes (such as cmd-f on some fora).
One of the most frustrating thing on the web is capturing any scrolling behavior, or catching conflicting keystrokes (such as cmd-f on some fora).
> Alright, I guess I'll go back to using js scrollbars instead /s
That'd be much better if you actually need a different behaviour.
Trying to bend the native scrollbar to your will is an exercise in pain.
That'd be much better if you actually need a different behaviour.
Trying to bend the native scrollbar to your will is an exercise in pain.
My kneejerk response to articles with these sorts of titles is nearly always just, "No thanks."
I know "considered harmful" has become a cliche, but I almost miss that format now.
I know "considered harmful" has become a cliche, but I almost miss that format now.
Sure let's just reenable blink and marquee in that case
In the article, he has a CodePen embedded that would be UNUSABLE if it didn't have decent custom scroll bars. This post is so egregiously bad.
I beg to disagree.
Actually at first, as I'm using my phone, I must say that Codepen mobile UX is great. There are three buttons on top that act as tabs. There are no visible scrollbars on phones, there are no visible scrollbars in Codepen. They either programmed that or conformed to the OS, the result is OK.
I switched to desktop mode to get the HTML and result views side by side. I have to horizontally scroll the page but that's to be expected on a narrow screen. There is no visible scrollbar but again, that could be because of the mobile OS. If I were on my laptop with a full screen window I wouldn't mind to have an always visible OS scrollbar at the right of the HTML editor. It's in the middle of the screen but I've got OS scrollbars in the middle of the screen any time I place an editor window to the left of my screen, so what's the problem?
Actually at first, as I'm using my phone, I must say that Codepen mobile UX is great. There are three buttons on top that act as tabs. There are no visible scrollbars on phones, there are no visible scrollbars in Codepen. They either programmed that or conformed to the OS, the result is OK.
I switched to desktop mode to get the HTML and result views side by side. I have to horizontally scroll the page but that's to be expected on a narrow screen. There is no visible scrollbar but again, that could be because of the mobile OS. If I were on my laptop with a full screen window I wouldn't mind to have an always visible OS scrollbar at the right of the HTML editor. It's in the middle of the screen but I've got OS scrollbars in the middle of the screen any time I place an editor window to the left of my screen, so what's the problem?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
Shoo. You're ruining the web!
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.
One thing I didn’t expect was that for a large data table that allowed side scrolling, Windows users comfortable with Excel didn’t know that they could scroll side to side because the scroll bar fell below the fold. I ended up needing to measure the page to set the height of the table to make sure that the table wouldn’t be taller than the page. But what I really wanted was to sticky the scroll bar so that it was always visible, or to display it at the top of the table instead of the bottom.
I want to style scroll bars for this, not to make them prettier.
I want to style scroll bars for this, not to make them prettier.
That's not so much "styling the scroll bar"; that's "trying to tell the OS widget library's metrics-policy logic its business, because you know better than it does, because it's insufficiently smart."
If you think about it, a "smarter" OS widget library would always "float" scrollbars at the edge of the visible part of the viewport that the overflowing surface occupies. No configurability needed — it's just always better.
So why expose the ability to do that for certain scrollbars in CSS — rather than just making all scrollbars everywhere always do that?
If you think about it, a "smarter" OS widget library would always "float" scrollbars at the edge of the visible part of the viewport that the overflowing surface occupies. No configurability needed — it's just always better.
So why expose the ability to do that for certain scrollbars in CSS — rather than just making all scrollbars everywhere always do that?
That's cool and all, but until I have enough influence personally to dictate Microsoft's design, I don't really have a choice but to depend on web APIs to achieve the desired effect.
You can dictate GTK and Qt's design.
Also, I think for Chrome at least, it draws scrollbars using its own widget library — built on top of Skia, I think? Not sure what the widget-library part itself is called. You could definitely contribute to that.
Also, I think for Chrome at least, it draws scrollbars using its own widget library — built on top of Skia, I think? Not sure what the widget-library part itself is called. You could definitely contribute to that.
I did make a scrollbar that appeared to stick to the bottom of the table. I used a div with the same width as the table, used a scroll event listener to update the tables actual scroll position and only had it appear when the user was currently over a table and that table overlapped the bottom of the viewport. It worked well in the sense that people would use it without thinking about it.
Wouldn't the solution be to make the data table as wide as it needs to be and use the OS horizontal scrollbar to access the rightmost columns?
It probably breaks the right side of the page grid layout but if there are many columns to see, the ability to see them should grant an exception. I made that choice a few times with my customers. They wanted to see the data in those pages, as if they were in Excel.
It probably breaks the right side of the page grid layout but if there are many columns to see, the ability to see them should grant an exception. I made that choice a few times with my customers. They wanted to see the data in those pages, as if they were in Excel.
On pages, I fully agree. Within components, I also agree but I've found it hard to push back when a design calls for scrollbars because the alternative is... what?
It can be difficult to visually say "Hey, you! There's more to see if you scroll down in this area" You can try to use gradients with fade-outs, you can try to make it so the top of the last item in a scroll area is just visible enough to make it clear something can be scrolled into view. I've also seen actual text-based messages at the bottom of scroll areas to let users know. But at that point, is it really better than creating your own little scroll bar?
Really I think we just need better APIs from the browsers to customize when a scroll bar is shown (again, not on the page level but within scrollable elements), and what it looks like. This has already gotten much better over the years but there are still some features that would be great to have in this area.
One thing I will say is I really dislike the smooth-scrolling behavior that some sites build in with JS. It's usually broken on macs that already have smooth scrolling and it's just a dumb thing to add.
It can be difficult to visually say "Hey, you! There's more to see if you scroll down in this area" You can try to use gradients with fade-outs, you can try to make it so the top of the last item in a scroll area is just visible enough to make it clear something can be scrolled into view. I've also seen actual text-based messages at the bottom of scroll areas to let users know. But at that point, is it really better than creating your own little scroll bar?
Really I think we just need better APIs from the browsers to customize when a scroll bar is shown (again, not on the page level but within scrollable elements), and what it looks like. This has already gotten much better over the years but there are still some features that would be great to have in this area.
One thing I will say is I really dislike the smooth-scrolling behavior that some sites build in with JS. It's usually broken on macs that already have smooth scrolling and it's just a dumb thing to add.
> One thing I will say is I really dislike the smooth-scrolling behavior that some sites build in with JS. It's usually broken on macs that already have smooth scrolling and it's just a dumb thing to add.
I'm fairly sure every platform uses smooth scrolling by default, and so I'm absolutely and utterly baffled as to why web devs think they need to implement it in JavaScript.
If you're on a platform without it, or you've explicitly disabled it, there's probably a good reason for it, so re-adding it with JavaScript is taking away agency from the user.
I'm fairly sure every platform uses smooth scrolling by default, and so I'm absolutely and utterly baffled as to why web devs think they need to implement it in JavaScript.
If you're on a platform without it, or you've explicitly disabled it, there's probably a good reason for it, so re-adding it with JavaScript is taking away agency from the user.
> Really I think we just need better APIs from the browsers to customize when a scroll bar is shown (again, not on the page level but within scrollable elements)
What do you have in mind beyond "always show", "show if needed", and "always hide"? Those have all existed for decades as "overflow: scroll", "overflow: auto", and "overflow: hidden".
What do you have in mind beyond "always show", "show if needed", and "always hide"? Those have all existed for decades as "overflow: scroll", "overflow: auto", and "overflow: hidden".
There is somebody on another thread asking for "stick to the visible margin of the element". But I guess most people want to change the scrolling behavior or appearance.
`overflow: hidden` hides the actual content. GP wants the element to be scrollable with a hidden scrollbar.
> GP wants the element to be scrollable with a hidden scrollbar.
If HN allowed emojis, I would reply with just the vomiting emoji.
If HN allowed emojis, I would reply with just the vomiting emoji.
You can do that already with:
section::-webkit-scrollbar{
display: none;
}
It's non-standard: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/::-webkit-s...
This is exactly what I’m talking about though. This browser prefix is not standard.
> Within components, I also agree but I've found it hard to push back when a design calls for scrollbars because the alternative is... what?
Accessibility. Mention that blind users will be unable to utilize the site without a lot of additional work and you can usually kill it dead.
Custom scrollbars are such a niche thing that usually nobody is married to the idea - I've found it quite easy in the past to kill off those sorts of weird quirks in design with just that word... If you still have issues mention that mobile browsers often do a lot of customization around bounce scrolling and the like. Building this design choice out now likely means that whenever Apple releases a new phone it's quite possible that your site look antiquated and requires some major reworks.
Accessibility. Mention that blind users will be unable to utilize the site without a lot of additional work and you can usually kill it dead.
Custom scrollbars are such a niche thing that usually nobody is married to the idea - I've found it quite easy in the past to kill off those sorts of weird quirks in design with just that word... If you still have issues mention that mobile browsers often do a lot of customization around bounce scrolling and the like. Building this design choice out now likely means that whenever Apple releases a new phone it's quite possible that your site look antiquated and requires some major reworks.
are blind users impacted by styling scrollbars with css or even hiding/showing them?
I'm not certain. Are you willing to spend a week of your life testing every different screen reader to make sure your site doesn't break one?
No need I can tell you the answer: No they are not affected. Feel free to make your scrollbars blue green with a red border and rounded edges. The content is still as accessible
Can you give an example of when a design calls for stylized scrollbars and there is no alternative.
Say your app is satirizing flashy magazines with a funky magenta-and-yellow color theme. Would you like a gray scrollbar in the middle of the page? Or, if your app is a medieval role playing game with a wooden theme for the UI, would you expect flat gray scrollbars to work well?
Modern disappearing scrollbars in Linux are an awful design:
- as scrollbar in browser disappears, I cannot see the position on the page and whether it is scrollable at all
- as scrollbar handle is very narrow, it is difficult to drag it
You might ask, why drag the scrollbar handle? Well, when you have tens thousands of lines in the terminal, it will take a long time to scroll it using touchpad or mouse wheel.
- as scrollbar in browser disappears, I cannot see the position on the page and whether it is scrollable at all
- as scrollbar handle is very narrow, it is difficult to drag it
You might ask, why drag the scrollbar handle? Well, when you have tens thousands of lines in the terminal, it will take a long time to scroll it using touchpad or mouse wheel.
It's an awful design because it ignores one is the most important factors of scrolling - document length. But then having wide scroll bars in short documents where you'd never use them is also bad design
It is good design to have "wide-enough-for-long-doc" scrollbars in short documents for principle of least surprise.
That's repeating the same mistake - trying to force one generic principle onto every situation.
Opt-in can solve that - only users that don't get surprised by a lack of useless elements can remove them
Opt-in can solve that - only users that don't get surprised by a lack of useless elements can remove them
Not a mistake. At worse a tradeoff. Hiding a scroll bar when you go below some arbitrary document height that would classically warrant a scroll bar is just confusing. People who use a mouse to scroll will not know what to do and assume there is a bug. And sometimes you want scrollbar level control even on a short document.
It is not forcing them to use the scrollbar: keyboard shortcuts and menu items should still work as well.
It is not forcing them to use the scrollbar: keyboard shortcuts and menu items should still work as well.
> Hiding a scroll bar when you go below some arbitrary document height that would classically warrant a scroll bar is just confusing.
No it's not because you OPT INTO this feature and could change the document height from arbitrary to a threshold where using your wheel is uncomfortable (and that would depend on your device, e.g., with infinite Logitech scroll wheel that length is much bigger since it's very easy to scroll large distances)
> People who use a mouse to scroll will not know what to do and assume there is a bug.
No they won't because they'd OPT INTO this feature
> And sometimes you want scrollbar level control even on a short document
I never do, but then there are also solutions for this that don't involve some narrow understanding of the principle of least surprise
> It is not forcing them to use the scrollbar
But it is forcing them to clutter UI/waste space by not allowing to hide the scrollbar in most frequent use cases
No it's not because you OPT INTO this feature and could change the document height from arbitrary to a threshold where using your wheel is uncomfortable (and that would depend on your device, e.g., with infinite Logitech scroll wheel that length is much bigger since it's very easy to scroll large distances)
> People who use a mouse to scroll will not know what to do and assume there is a bug.
No they won't because they'd OPT INTO this feature
> And sometimes you want scrollbar level control even on a short document
I never do, but then there are also solutions for this that don't involve some narrow understanding of the principle of least surprise
> It is not forcing them to use the scrollbar
But it is forcing them to clutter UI/waste space by not allowing to hide the scrollbar in most frequent use cases
Ok if we are now saying it is an opt-in feature (to hide the scrollbar for short enough docs) then fine I guess.
Feels like we have hashed out a JIRA description in the planning session of some imaginary product, now someone code this!
Feels like we have hashed out a JIRA description in the planning session of some imaginary product, now someone code this!
for anyone wanting to change their scrollbars for firefox and gnome:
- in firefox there is an option to always show scrollbars (section "browsing")
- in gnome you can change the setting org/gnome/desktop/interface/overlay-scrolling to false (with i.e. dconf-editor)
- in firefox there is an option to always show scrollbars (section "browsing")
- in gnome you can change the setting org/gnome/desktop/interface/overlay-scrolling to false (with i.e. dconf-editor)
The worst pattern I've seen is setting the page height to the viewport height and then placing scrollbars on containers. For example this particular UI library has managed to break print layout and page navigation keys and mouse scrolling until you focus the content div
https://www.skeleton.dev/docs/get-started
I was once guilty of doing this on a site I made but the users called it out so I fixed it. It's another thing for a UI library to spread this pattern.
I was once guilty of doing this on a site I made but the users called it out so I fixed it. It's another thing for a UI library to spread this pattern.
Oh the pain of printing any modern news site with their fixed headers and popping ads. You just select the text and "R-CLK->Print selected" praying that at least the content is just a list of paragraphs (<p>) and nothing more...
I usually go into the inspector, find the element that contains the story and "screenshot node." Or I go the opposite way and "block elements" with ublock until I get a reasonable page, then delete all of those rules after I print. Unless they have a print stylesheet, of course. People still do those.
Fixed headers and popups that are not a problem per se but it's bad implementations that cause the problems. It's possible to use a print stylesheet to hide certain elements and set the background to white.
Saw this once, it was a nightmare to maintain the page once it got out of control
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Also don't use buttons that don't show me the link I'm navigating to. If you must have a different style, style them around an `a href`, not a `button`.
And actions should be buttons, not links. I'm looking at all of those cookie websites with a 'link' that says 'Confirm choices' and a button that says 'Allow all'. Instinctively we go to the button, not the link.
Weirdly enough I responded on the Image send to Microsoft via MS Edge article about how even Microsoft, the writer of LOTS of documentation on how to make good UIs, abuses all these things.
Now, of course we could argue about how these things just visuals, but that's not completely true. Lots of screen readers depend on the semantics of the document structure to actually identify objects correctly. Button? Action, edit, sign up, delete, .... Something that actually changes something.
Link: navigation...
And actions should be buttons, not links. I'm looking at all of those cookie websites with a 'link' that says 'Confirm choices' and a button that says 'Allow all'. Instinctively we go to the button, not the link.
Weirdly enough I responded on the Image send to Microsoft via MS Edge article about how even Microsoft, the writer of LOTS of documentation on how to make good UIs, abuses all these things.
Now, of course we could argue about how these things just visuals, but that's not completely true. Lots of screen readers depend on the semantics of the document structure to actually identify objects correctly. Button? Action, edit, sign up, delete, .... Something that actually changes something.
Link: navigation...
aria roles solve that problem easily for screen readers, so you can use buttons for navigation and text links for actions without big issues
No, they don't.
Aria roles are not for making one tag to work like another. (Otherwise what is the point of having different tags with different semantics?).
Aria is for making inaccessible html more accessible. Links can not be disabled (buttons can) - so they dont rely on js to work; Buttons rely on js (except for submitting the form). There is no way to interchange one with another without sacrificing usability.
Aria is for making inaccessible html more accessible. Links can not be disabled (buttons can) - so they dont rely on js to work; Buttons rely on js (except for submitting the form). There is no way to interchange one with another without sacrificing usability.
>> Apple learned the lesson about visible scrollbars the hard way when it introduced its ultra-minimal, disappearing scrollbar indicators.
>> There’s no visual indication that there’s more content present in this window—the only way to discover it is to scroll downwards. However, without an affordance to indicate the presence of additional offscreen content, the chances are low that someone will bother to check.
I appreciate the callout that Apple is an infringer on removing the scrollbars, which is a bad UI practice. For the entire lifespan of the web, overflow content indicators have been (aka scrollbars), for better or worse, an inherent function of the browser.
>> There’s no visual indication that there’s more content present in this window—the only way to discover it is to scroll downwards. However, without an affordance to indicate the presence of additional offscreen content, the chances are low that someone will bother to check.
I appreciate the callout that Apple is an infringer on removing the scrollbars, which is a bad UI practice. For the entire lifespan of the web, overflow content indicators have been (aka scrollbars), for better or worse, an inherent function of the browser.
Moreover, Google said they did a study when they first released their minimalist homepage design and when people saw lots of white space below the search bar, they assumed the page wasn't finished loading yet and more content was to come.
People were accustomed to long pages like Yahoo's homepage with lots of content below the search bar.
They solved it by adding a footer section with typical copyright text and people understood that the page was finished loading.
People were accustomed to long pages like Yahoo's homepage with lots of content below the search bar.
They solved it by adding a footer section with typical copyright text and people understood that the page was finished loading.
On the contrary, we should be encouraging people to customize scrollbars so that scrolling is taken into consideration again. It can help get rid of trends like invisible/hidden scrollbars or those useless horizontal progress bars that shows how far into a page you've read
There's been an ongoing trend in UI design in recent years to assume more and more of the user.
The removal of scrollbars from browsers confused my parents. Instead of having up and down arrows by your content now you're just expected to just know that you scroll with your mouse / trackpad. Similarly, modern versions of Windows will just assume you know that the four squares at the bottom of your screen is where you need to click to start using your computer, and Mac will just assume you know the red dot closes the current window. These patterns probably seem obvious to us as power users, but I find average users get endlessly confused by them.
And it's not just elderly people who get tripped up by this. I've seen kids who have primarily used phones and tablets growing up get confused when they first use a desktop computer because they haven't yet learnt all the required prerequisite UI patterns. Even as a power user if you switch from Windows to Mac (or vice versa) it often takes some time just figure out all of the completely unintuitive modern UI because the UI designer is lazily assuming you already know how to do everything...
Just yesterday my girlfriend (who uses her computer almost every day) asked me for help replying to an email in outlook on her laptop. Confused I asked, "what do you mean you need help replying to an email?". Well, she was confused because she doesn't use outlook much and didn't know she needed to click the small curved arrow icon to reply to an email. For the last 5 minutes she had been stupidly looking for a button that said "reply".
While I completely agree with your sentiment about scroll bars, I feel like this a much bigger issue and one that web developers shouldn't be required to fix. The core issue here is that your OS / browser shouldn't be hiding your scrollbar to begin with... This isn't something web developers should be addressing, but the UI designers who think it's preferable for me to have a browser URL bar that is 80% of my screen width at the expense of the word "back" on my back button.
The removal of scrollbars from browsers confused my parents. Instead of having up and down arrows by your content now you're just expected to just know that you scroll with your mouse / trackpad. Similarly, modern versions of Windows will just assume you know that the four squares at the bottom of your screen is where you need to click to start using your computer, and Mac will just assume you know the red dot closes the current window. These patterns probably seem obvious to us as power users, but I find average users get endlessly confused by them.
And it's not just elderly people who get tripped up by this. I've seen kids who have primarily used phones and tablets growing up get confused when they first use a desktop computer because they haven't yet learnt all the required prerequisite UI patterns. Even as a power user if you switch from Windows to Mac (or vice versa) it often takes some time just figure out all of the completely unintuitive modern UI because the UI designer is lazily assuming you already know how to do everything...
Just yesterday my girlfriend (who uses her computer almost every day) asked me for help replying to an email in outlook on her laptop. Confused I asked, "what do you mean you need help replying to an email?". Well, she was confused because she doesn't use outlook much and didn't know she needed to click the small curved arrow icon to reply to an email. For the last 5 minutes she had been stupidly looking for a button that said "reply".
While I completely agree with your sentiment about scroll bars, I feel like this a much bigger issue and one that web developers shouldn't be required to fix. The core issue here is that your OS / browser shouldn't be hiding your scrollbar to begin with... This isn't something web developers should be addressing, but the UI designers who think it's preferable for me to have a browser URL bar that is 80% of my screen width at the expense of the word "back" on my back button.
> And it's not just elderly people who get tripped up by this. I've seen kids who have primarily used phones and tablets growing up get confused when they first use a desktop computer
It goes the other way as well lol. There's lots of ridiculous random gestures for android/iOS
It goes the other way as well lol. There's lots of ridiculous random gestures for android/iOS
In general it feels like a lot of UI design these days is optimizing for looking pretty in screenshots and photos rather than being useful as a tool, it's honestly gotten really frustrating in recent years.
A month or so ago, a screenshot of Snow-Leopad-era OS X standard UI controls made the rounds on the fediverse. One forgets so fast with incremental change, but when you take it in with some distance, it’s truly devastating how things have regressed since that time.
The Apple folk and adjacent circles like to throw around how “design is how it works™”, but design hasn’t been how it works in Macos for a while (and it’s not better anywhere else).
The Apple folk and adjacent circles like to throw around how “design is how it works™”, but design hasn’t been how it works in Macos for a while (and it’s not better anywhere else).
> These patterns probably seem obvious to us as power users, but I find average users get endlessly confused by them.
They're obvious to power users because we have seen them a million times before.
When a web developer does a custom scroll bar that is when "average" users get confused, because suddenly they're presented with something they haven't seen.
It's not too much to expect a user to know how scrolling works by default in their client operating system/browser. It _is_ asking too much to expect users to know how scrolling works when you customise how it works. Web developers should not be touching this stuff.
They're obvious to power users because we have seen them a million times before.
When a web developer does a custom scroll bar that is when "average" users get confused, because suddenly they're presented with something they haven't seen.
It's not too much to expect a user to know how scrolling works by default in their client operating system/browser. It _is_ asking too much to expect users to know how scrolling works when you customise how it works. Web developers should not be touching this stuff.
> 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.
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.
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'.)
('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'.)
> There’s no visual indication that there’s more content present in this window—the only way to discover it is to scroll downwards. However, without an affordance to indicate the presence of additional offscreen content, the chances are low that someone will bother to check.
> This is why Apple introduced a preference to always show scroll bars.
But the proper solution is to add the info/affordance in that specific instance instead of always wasting space even when you don't use the scroll bar. This would also allow you to have a more convenient wide scroll bar for when you actually need to use it (in very large documents/lists, though currently you can't setup your scroll bar to depend on that)
And here is the main problem with the article - this general approach blocks would block all UI innovation until some browser/OS vendor implemented something poorly (of course, this doesn't mean your implementation will be better, but someone else's will be)
But the proper solution is to add the info/affordance in that specific instance instead of always wasting space even when you don't use the scroll bar. This would also allow you to have a more convenient wide scroll bar for when you actually need to use it (in very large documents/lists, though currently you can't setup your scroll bar to depend on that)
And here is the main problem with the article - this general approach blocks would block all UI innovation until some browser/OS vendor implemented something poorly (of course, this doesn't mean your implementation will be better, but someone else's will be)
I was under the impression "scrollbar = more to see" has been somewhat of a standard for a while now. The Mac example is just one of those classic UI fails.
The worst are the pages where the scroll wheel doesn't work, even when you can see the scrollbar just fine. I'm always baffled, since no simple page would have that problem. Clearly they developed it and didn't care for breaking it.
In html I would sometimes force the scrollbar to always show to prevent layout stuttering. But otherwise, changing the color of the scrollbar to match the fg and bg colors of the page shouldn't be too big of a deal. And I wouldn't mind if some browser skins would change the default scrollbar colors to match, either.
Scrollbars are already stylized across the web and across programs. Most users don't mind it. With options come the bad choices, which anyone can list on one page.
The worst are the pages where the scroll wheel doesn't work, even when you can see the scrollbar just fine. I'm always baffled, since no simple page would have that problem. Clearly they developed it and didn't care for breaking it.
In html I would sometimes force the scrollbar to always show to prevent layout stuttering. But otherwise, changing the color of the scrollbar to match the fg and bg colors of the page shouldn't be too big of a deal. And I wouldn't mind if some browser skins would change the default scrollbar colors to match, either.
Scrollbars are already stylized across the web and across programs. Most users don't mind it. With options come the bad choices, which anyone can list on one page.
> "scrollbar = more to see" has been somewhat of a standard for a while now.
That's not a great standard because it conflates conveying information with providing control.
001 px width is enough to convey isScrollable info, but makes it impossible to scroll
100 px width makes it easy to scroll, but is a waste of space to convey convey isScrollable info
That's not a great standard because it conflates conveying information with providing control.
001 px width is enough to convey isScrollable info, but makes it impossible to scroll
100 px width makes it easy to scroll, but is a waste of space to convey convey isScrollable info
Custom scrollbars, as in "I'll hijack the scroll events and draw custom stuff on the side of the element" kind of custom, yeah, that's bad and buggy and annoying. Being able to style native scrollbars is a godsend which satisfies designers and brand people and prevents the first kind of custom scrollbars.
What is the point of satisfying a designer? If they design a product for a customer, then the focus should be on satisfying the customer. If they design a product for themselves to use, OK fine, go ahead. But their expectations should not be pushed onto everyone else.
A website is not a playground to try out ones figma crayons making ever more complex figma designs. One of the lessons in about every design course or degree is, that the medium plays an important role. Web design should care about being design for websites. By not caring about the actual website and merely caring about ones figma design, one neglects the medium. The result is a bad design. Instead the design needs to carefully weigh what is easily possible with the medium, functionality, and look and feel.
A website is not a playground to try out ones figma crayons making ever more complex figma designs. One of the lessons in about every design course or degree is, that the medium plays an important role. Web design should care about being design for websites. By not caring about the actual website and merely caring about ones figma design, one neglects the medium. The result is a bad design. Instead the design needs to carefully weigh what is easily possible with the medium, functionality, and look and feel.
What's possible with the medium, whether you like it or not, is a lot.
I understand where you're coming from, but it's not where most users come from. Leaving scrollbars or whatever else unstyled and sticking out like a sore thumb tells those users "they can't be bothered to do it right, but everybody else does".
That's the designer's point.
If you want to go back to '94 websites so your scrollbars and drop-downs don't look out of place, good luck.
I understand where you're coming from, but it's not where most users come from. Leaving scrollbars or whatever else unstyled and sticking out like a sore thumb tells those users "they can't be bothered to do it right, but everybody else does".
That's the designer's point.
If you want to go back to '94 websites so your scrollbars and drop-downs don't look out of place, good luck.
I agree with many points but there is definitely a need for custom scrollbars.
The reality is that if you have scrolling in the page (like a column layout for example), you kinda have to customize the scrollbars. If only to not break your layout as scrollbars are completely different everywhere, hidden, different widths, some ugly, some nice, no reliable way to detect the situation, it's a mess.
I would opt for more options: give us better tools to style (around) scrollbars, give us the tools to honor what the user prefers, to know when and when not to blend it in with the UI, to increase contrast, or to just leave it alone.
Just not customizing is not a realistic solution for a lot of situations.
The reality is that if you have scrolling in the page (like a column layout for example), you kinda have to customize the scrollbars. If only to not break your layout as scrollbars are completely different everywhere, hidden, different widths, some ugly, some nice, no reliable way to detect the situation, it's a mess.
I would opt for more options: give us better tools to style (around) scrollbars, give us the tools to honor what the user prefers, to know when and when not to blend it in with the UI, to increase contrast, or to just leave it alone.
Just not customizing is not a realistic solution for a lot of situations.
Your UI really shouldn't be so unresponsive that the width of an element's scroll bar throws off your design. As for the aesthetics of the scroll bar: it might look ugly to you, but that's what the user expects their scroll bar to look like!
Designing well for web requires a bit of a paradigm shift compared to designing a print document or even a native app. You have to accept that you're going to be a guest in the user's browser, and that means you don't have control of everything. Failing to accept that just leads to frustration, but if you can embrace it and strive to be a good citizen of the user's browser, the resulting symbiosis can be beautiful in its own right!
Designing well for web requires a bit of a paradigm shift compared to designing a print document or even a native app. You have to accept that you're going to be a guest in the user's browser, and that means you don't have control of everything. Failing to accept that just leads to frustration, but if you can embrace it and strive to be a good citizen of the user's browser, the resulting symbiosis can be beautiful in its own right!
> but that's what the user expects their scroll bar to look like!
You base that on..? I’ve had users complain about their native scrollbars more than once. Native scrollbars can make things look very broken.
In terms of responsiveness, true for a normal website, but sometimes impossible in more complex ui elements (like I said, not the page scroll, but in page scrollable elements)
I would really like to see some research on this idea that people prefer native elements, it’s not what I see in user tests and the feedback I get. My experience is that people want a functioning app that doesn’t look broken.
My whole point is: we should be able to provide a great experience that’s accessible and allows the user to give their preferences (like prefers reduced motion).
You base that on..? I’ve had users complain about their native scrollbars more than once. Native scrollbars can make things look very broken.
In terms of responsiveness, true for a normal website, but sometimes impossible in more complex ui elements (like I said, not the page scroll, but in page scrollable elements)
I would really like to see some research on this idea that people prefer native elements, it’s not what I see in user tests and the feedback I get. My experience is that people want a functioning app that doesn’t look broken.
My whole point is: we should be able to provide a great experience that’s accessible and allows the user to give their preferences (like prefers reduced motion).
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Several billion people understand and make good use of the standard HTML scroll bars.
For any change, on the first day, only the programmer understands the new scroll bars.
For an Internet user who each month or so goes to dozens, maybe hundreds, of Web sites, all the new scroll bars are something new to learn likely particular to that site. So, for that user, a significant part of the Internet becomes dozens or even hundreds of times harder to use.
Same for standard HTML push buttons, links, check boxes, radio buttons, multi-line text boxes, single line text boxes (and the ones for passwords), etc.
Changes make the site obscure and significantly more work to use.
Web site owners: When I see a Web page with an obscure user interface, commonly I just do a single left click on the X in the upper right corner of the Web browser instance displaying that page.
Beyond an obscure user interface, often I can conclude that the Web site does not want me to see the content on their Web pages because they cover up the content with pop-up windows or expand and contract some header material at the top of the page, material that wastes limited vertical space on my screen.
Another problem is Web pages that follow my mouse pointer and respond to its position without my giving a click. Big interruption in using the site. Nearly always I'm just trying to bring the window to the top of the Z-order so, instead, have to swat like a dozen flying insects the various responses to the mouse click -- again, I do want to see the page and just want to bring it to the top of the Z-order.
Then there is Web site code making the window larger -- again it's like swatting flying insects. No, no, 1000 times no, with rare exceptions, I do NOT want any one page to hog my screen area. The reason is fundamental: In visiting the page, I'm trying to get something DONE, and that requires seeing at least two windows, maybe a few more than two. When one program takes up all or too much of the screen area, I can't see the other windows I need and, thus, can't get the work done.
There is an old remark that goes something like "Just because you could doesn't mean you should."-
For any change, on the first day, only the programmer understands the new scroll bars.
For an Internet user who each month or so goes to dozens, maybe hundreds, of Web sites, all the new scroll bars are something new to learn likely particular to that site. So, for that user, a significant part of the Internet becomes dozens or even hundreds of times harder to use.
Same for standard HTML push buttons, links, check boxes, radio buttons, multi-line text boxes, single line text boxes (and the ones for passwords), etc.
Changes make the site obscure and significantly more work to use.
Web site owners: When I see a Web page with an obscure user interface, commonly I just do a single left click on the X in the upper right corner of the Web browser instance displaying that page.
Beyond an obscure user interface, often I can conclude that the Web site does not want me to see the content on their Web pages because they cover up the content with pop-up windows or expand and contract some header material at the top of the page, material that wastes limited vertical space on my screen.
Another problem is Web pages that follow my mouse pointer and respond to its position without my giving a click. Big interruption in using the site. Nearly always I'm just trying to bring the window to the top of the Z-order so, instead, have to swat like a dozen flying insects the various responses to the mouse click -- again, I do want to see the page and just want to bring it to the top of the Z-order.
Then there is Web site code making the window larger -- again it's like swatting flying insects. No, no, 1000 times no, with rare exceptions, I do NOT want any one page to hog my screen area. The reason is fundamental: In visiting the page, I'm trying to get something DONE, and that requires seeing at least two windows, maybe a few more than two. When one program takes up all or too much of the screen area, I can't see the other windows I need and, thus, can't get the work done.
There is an old remark that goes something like "Just because you could doesn't mean you should."-
> Same for standard HTML push buttons, links, check boxes
Interesting that you mention checkboxes. For a long time native checkboxes on Linux (distro?) would come up impossibly tiny if you had a decent-sized screen. They were hard to hit accurately with a mouse, and impossible with a trackpad. That seems to have been cured now, but I don't know when it was fixed.
Interesting that you mention checkboxes. For a long time native checkboxes on Linux (distro?) would come up impossibly tiny if you had a decent-sized screen. They were hard to hit accurately with a mouse, and impossible with a trackpad. That seems to have been cured now, but I don't know when it was fixed.
What about when a native scroll bar looks completely off compared to the the theme of the rest of the page?
The thing is that the looks of scrollbars vary so much between platforms - on mobile you can barely see them only when you do the action of scrolling! So it would be rather weird that, if you are seeing a website in mobile and you just put a scrollbar because reasons, you're quitting some horizontal/vertical space to the effective area of the website.
And note that the act of scrolling is much more related to the OS host rather than something the website itself should provide (now, if there was an standard way across every device to scroll to the very top or the very bottom of a view (webpage, list, etcetera...). I am a designer myself but I agree than we should not mess with them. And the plus that it's a bit less of work for us (and devs, when they have to implement those things).
And note that the act of scrolling is much more related to the OS host rather than something the website itself should provide (now, if there was an standard way across every device to scroll to the very top or the very bottom of a view (webpage, list, etcetera...). I am a designer myself but I agree than we should not mess with them. And the plus that it's a bit less of work for us (and devs, when they have to implement those things).
It’s an Electron app for me so it’s only going to be on Chromium on desktop
But if scroll bars can be themed with CSS now, that should still give the browser control over things like whether they take up space or not and the actual scrolling behaviour, right? It would just allow the developer to give some styling hints so it doesn’t look completely disconnected from the rest of the page
But if scroll bars can be themed with CSS now, that should still give the browser control over things like whether they take up space or not and the actual scrolling behaviour, right? It would just allow the developer to give some styling hints so it doesn’t look completely disconnected from the rest of the page
But it will look disconnected from every other app on the user's system.
Whatever style the user currently has installed on their system, if the scrollbars on your app look the same as all the other scrollbars they ever use, they'll recognise them instantly and know how to use them instantly, with zero additional cognitive load.
You users might be using enough of their brain to figure out your app (maybe because they're also being partially distracted by their boss/child/phone/pet/music) already, don't make them spend time thinking about your gorram scrollbar as well.
Whatever style the user currently has installed on their system, if the scrollbars on your app look the same as all the other scrollbars they ever use, they'll recognise them instantly and know how to use them instantly, with zero additional cognitive load.
You users might be using enough of their brain to figure out your app (maybe because they're also being partially distracted by their boss/child/phone/pet/music) already, don't make them spend time thinking about your gorram scrollbar as well.
I’m not really going for a native OS theme, if I wanted that then I’d probably have to use a native GUI toolkit
Function over form. If fancy scrollbars make it harder to use, then they should be gone. Design should never trump utility.
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13787163/161954436...
Wouldn’t this look completely off with a massive light mode default Chromium scroll bar in the middle of everything? When I was developing that my main goal was to get the UI looking consistent and clean so it would feel good to use, which I think is an underappreciated thing; if your UI doesn’t “feel right” then people won’t enjoy using it no matter how functional it is
To be fair it probably does have contrast issues which I could improve
Note: it’s an Electron app so maybe that’s different
Wouldn’t this look completely off with a massive light mode default Chromium scroll bar in the middle of everything? When I was developing that my main goal was to get the UI looking consistent and clean so it would feel good to use, which I think is an underappreciated thing; if your UI doesn’t “feel right” then people won’t enjoy using it no matter how functional it is
To be fair it probably does have contrast issues which I could improve
Note: it’s an Electron app so maybe that’s different
Use CSS color-scheme: dark to indicate that system widgets, such as scroll bars, should be dark https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/color-schem...
TIL. This actually solves my main need for custom scrollbars.
Now the only remaining use case is when designers don't design components around default scrollbars. Sometimes the default one just looks too big compared to the size of the component. But this can be solved with design (don't cram stuff into small fixed boxes that then need to be scrollable).
Now the only remaining use case is when designers don't design components around default scrollbars. Sometimes the default one just looks too big compared to the size of the component. But this can be solved with design (don't cram stuff into small fixed boxes that then need to be scrollable).
That would help, it wouldn’t look quite right though.
What’s the difference between styling a scroll bar and, say, a button in an application like this? If you want everything to look how the user prefers and fit into the OS then you shouldn’t really style anything at all
What’s the difference between styling a scroll bar and, say, a button in an application like this? If you want everything to look how the user prefers and fit into the OS then you shouldn’t really style anything at all
> Wouldn’t this look completely off with a massive light mode default Chromium scroll bar in the middle of everything?
Yes, which is why that design is wrong. Respect @media(prefers-color-scheme). Forcing a light or dark background causes readability issues for some people.
Yes, which is why that design is wrong. Respect @media(prefers-color-scheme). Forcing a light or dark background causes readability issues for some people.
Think like this: They have never been a part of the theme of the page. Just like the user's magenta tabbar
It’s an Electron app in my case so there’s no browser chrome for it to fit into, and the scroll bar is also in the middle of dark-themed content:
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13787163/161954436...
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13787163/161954436...
This is actually why I have been resisting the new tweetdeck experience. (That and the activity feature being removed). The scrollbars are so bad on Windows. The screenshots I have seen from mac look nice enough, but windows scrollbars were never meant to be in the middle of the webpage 6 times.
You'll live.
One of my very first blog posts[1], which took off at the time on HN[2] was on this topic - in reaction to the trend of "horizontal page progress bars" (a.k.a. scroll bars!)
What's old is new again... and again... and again... :)
[1] https://bbrks.me/reinventing-scrollbars/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6246777
What's old is new again... and again... and again... :)
[1] https://bbrks.me/reinventing-scrollbars/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6246777
If only this were a law. I can't stand when sites play "hide the scrollbar" or "find the hover sweet spot to display the scrollbar" and I click on where I think the scrollbar is and instead click on a link that's was two pixels away from where I thought I was clicking. How is this accessible? Edit: How does this improve the user experience?
I agree with the overall point, but there's some bits here that are a little bit silly
>You might be scoffing at the kilobytes this removal represents, but when it comes to web performance, every little bit counts
Go to Apple.com. Do you think that they value minimizing site size or do they prioritize the design first and then figure out how to make it performant? What this argument is really saying is that you should make the value judgement that performance vs quality should be somewhere towards the performance side, but I think plenty of people would make a different decision. You can argue that the scrollbar is extremely low value and therefore performance should be the priority but then... why are you writing an article about scrollbars?
>You might be scoffing at the kilobytes this removal represents, but when it comes to web performance, every little bit counts
Go to Apple.com. Do you think that they value minimizing site size or do they prioritize the design first and then figure out how to make it performant? What this argument is really saying is that you should make the value judgement that performance vs quality should be somewhere towards the performance side, but I think plenty of people would make a different decision. You can argue that the scrollbar is extremely low value and therefore performance should be the priority but then... why are you writing an article about scrollbars?
Scrollbars are frustrating to handle. Getting their actual size if you need to do stuff like compensate for a virtual table is really tedious. And Macs do them entirely different from everyone else, so that’s not nice either.
Another fun one is scroll-triggered animations, as one would commonly find on an Apple product detail page, as just an example.
The problem is that it assumes smooth scrolling input, typically a touchpad or a touch-only device. The experience completely breaks down into wild stuttering when scrolling with friction: mouse-wheel that scrolls with discrete steps or the classic "drag the scollbar" interaction.
Even when using smooth scrolling input it sucks, as you carefully need to time/verify your scroll speed as content appears/disappears based on force applied.
The problem is that it assumes smooth scrolling input, typically a touchpad or a touch-only device. The experience completely breaks down into wild stuttering when scrolling with friction: mouse-wheel that scrolls with discrete steps or the classic "drag the scollbar" interaction.
Even when using smooth scrolling input it sucks, as you carefully need to time/verify your scroll speed as content appears/disappears based on force applied.
Fwiw, that huge font size doesn’t invite me to actually read the text. I’d rather have custom scroll bars than try to read when there literally are just three sentences that fit on my iPhone viewport.
from the very first text on the page:
"Updating in the open
Things might look a little janky for a bit, but that’s okay! I am in the process of refreshing the design."
"Updating in the open
Things might look a little janky for a bit, but that’s okay! I am in the process of refreshing the design."
Too much fun to be had, Streisand:
body {
scrollbar-color: #f16d4f #cccccc;
&::-webkit-scrollbar {
width: 13rem;
}
&::-webkit-scrollbar-track {
background: #000;
}
&::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb {
background-image: url("https://picsum.photos/200/200");
background-repeat:none;
height: 13rem;
border-radius: 13rem;
}
}How many of the arguments apply to any CSS styling?
Indeed, I was just about to comment on the linked page overstyling fonts and colors while suggesting to avoid overstyling other elements. The title can be clipped to "Don't use custom CSS" while reusing the same justifications.
Isn't that why so many people love Firefox's reader mode?
The author's main point is "When you override this expression, you’re indirectly communicating that someone’s personal preferences are less important than your own visual sensibilities" but that's always be the entire point of CSS. The browser comes with default styles, the user can override those, the website can override those overrides, and then extensions can override that. Granted, very few users probably do override the browser default styles due to those defaults rarely getting used anyway given the prevalence of websites doing so...
Also interesting that the author makes no mention of the ability for the site to set the color of the address bar area for Android browsers. Seems like the same gripe should be had.
Aside: I find it funny that the author says "This phenomenon is why checkboxes use squares and radio buttons use circles" and then links to a page for the reader to find out more, in which the prominent photo is of a radio with square pop-out buttons.
But a good read nonetheless.
Also interesting that the author makes no mention of the ability for the site to set the color of the address bar area for Android browsers. Seems like the same gripe should be had.
Aside: I find it funny that the author says "This phenomenon is why checkboxes use squares and radio buttons use circles" and then links to a page for the reader to find out more, in which the prominent photo is of a radio with square pop-out buttons.
But a good read nonetheless.
Favorite line in this entire article....sums up the thought very nice and answers the "why" when I have to explain why modify components is not a good idea.
Ambiguity means less certainty about what the piece of UI is, how you interact with it, and what effects taking action on it will cause. The more you deviate, the more confusing things get.
Ambiguity means less certainty about what the piece of UI is, how you interact with it, and what effects taking action on it will cause. The more you deviate, the more confusing things get.
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I mean, I use custom scrollbars so my apps look the same on each OS. Do you propose that I should instead accept windows making horrible ugly things that take up more space rather than just showing a minimal scroll bar?
Seems like a non issue to me. My users are much happier with the more minimalist scrolls I’ve implemented over windows stealing 30px per scrollbar
Seems like a non issue to me. My users are much happier with the more minimalist scrolls I’ve implemented over windows stealing 30px per scrollbar
What's going on in that Finder video?
>There’s no visual indication that there’s more content present in this window
Not only that. There is a clear indicator that there isn't more content, since the last row isn't filled. Only, there is, but one of the rows has randomly been truncated for some reason?
>There’s no visual indication that there’s more content present in this window
Not only that. There is a clear indicator that there isn't more content, since the last row isn't filled. Only, there is, but one of the rows has randomly been truncated for some reason?
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Not to be an asshole, but --- well, I guess I'll be an asshole.
This is good, thoroughly-researched advice with just enough condescension that I walked away from it kinda wanting to style my own CSS scrollbars.
Additionally, there's a comment on this post replying to someone with "You'll live" which really isn't helping the case presented in the article.
I won't, I don't have a good reason to, but I had a nice nostalgia trip to w3schools: https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_custom_scrollbar.a...
This is good, thoroughly-researched advice with just enough condescension that I walked away from it kinda wanting to style my own CSS scrollbars.
Additionally, there's a comment on this post replying to someone with "You'll live" which really isn't helping the case presented in the article.
I won't, I don't have a good reason to, but I had a nice nostalgia trip to w3schools: https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_custom_scrollbar.a...
I don't know if it was Apple that pioneered the hidden scrollbars but it's extremely stupid and makes everyones lives using a computer much harder when navigating using the GUI, - before that there was always folder size indicator right there.
Can we get back to some actual human friendly interface guidelines please? I like both Apple and designers in large parts, but they've gotten too much influence.
Also extreme whitespace designs with scrolling hell.
Give us back GUI's with lots of content on screen, it may looks dense but is much easier to navigate, and can be pretty if you follow an engineering / power user ethos.
Can we get back to some actual human friendly interface guidelines please? I like both Apple and designers in large parts, but they've gotten too much influence.
Also extreme whitespace designs with scrolling hell.
Give us back GUI's with lots of content on screen, it may looks dense but is much easier to navigate, and can be pretty if you follow an engineering / power user ethos.
Funny to see this link here, just after I saw this site yesterday. I was forced to google how to disable custom scrollbars when I was reading the "A simple hash table in C" link from 2 days ago [1].
The site set the scrollbar width to 4 pixels which was so narrow I could just see it but couldn't grab it with mouse anymore. Totally unusable.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36302552
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36302552
Don't use custom font sizes in your blog.
There was a quick starburst trend around 2010 where super-fancy css componentry was being heavily explored & all sorts of interesting but not necessarily better stuff was being done, with radical redesigns. My mini-project submission for a job I got was using a super melted Geiger esque up-down button set.
I've tried to go back & find evidence of this era, to find more examples of these heavily glitzed up components. And wow, so much of this has disappeared entirely off the net. Maybe I'm lacking the right keywords. But this feels like a mega flash in the pan that came & went super fast.
I've tried to go back & find evidence of this era, to find more examples of these heavily glitzed up components. And wow, so much of this has disappeared entirely off the net. Maybe I'm lacking the right keywords. But this feels like a mega flash in the pan that came & went super fast.
What about when you have scrollbars inside the "scope of concern" the author pointed out..
The sweeping statement in the title doesn't feel fully thought out even after the author ranted for over 3,000 words
The sweeping statement in the title doesn't feel fully thought out even after the author ranted for over 3,000 words
> Scrollbars are part of the area of the browser that is outside your scope of concern.
This is simply wrong. You might have a scrollbar in your content, which indeed is the scope of concern for the developer.
This is simply wrong. You might have a scrollbar in your content, which indeed is the scope of concern for the developer.
> You might be scoffing at the kilobytes this removal represents, but when it comes to web performance, every little bit counts
I read this, and I get a very good idea of what the rest of the post will contain.
I read this, and I get a very good idea of what the rest of the post will contain.
The awesome thing is that this comes right after an example that uses about 200 characters...
I know we love to talk about optimizing web contents, but a single selector and a few hundred bytes (before minification and compression...) is not significant
I know we love to talk about optimizing web contents, but a single selector and a few hundred bytes (before minification and compression...) is not significant
I just wanted to say thank you.
I didn't know about the setting to always show scrollbars on macOS and them being hidden by default was bothering me for a while.
it does cause problems sometimes when there are embedded scrollable panels (that may not even scroll) where the scrollbars get in the way.
I feel the same way about scroll-jacking and smooth scroll.
I like the site csstricks.com but a while back I was disappointed to see they were customizing their scrollbar. It seemed really tacky and unappealing
this post could have been way less that a million lines long. maybe if it had a nice colored scrollbar it would be more pleasant to read.
kidding aside, it is longer that it could be, to get the point across. maybe the browser just needs a similar setting to the macos and windows one, to never use css on scrollbar, and we're good?
kidding aside, it is longer that it could be, to get the point across. maybe the browser just needs a similar setting to the macos and windows one, to never use css on scrollbar, and we're good?
I'll use whatever the hell I want, lol.
I largely agree, but the one thing I have been wanting to do sometimes is too be able to put marks/indicators on the scrollbar of where important pieces of information is in the flow.
A lot like chrome does when you use ctrl+f to search for a word.
A lot like chrome does when you use ctrl+f to search for a word.
I have an application that looks terrible if I don't make the scrollbar transparent.
I thought this was going to be about not using those horrible javascript scrollbar libraries, which make the code a lot more complex (I tried them all).
> I have an application that looks terrible if I don't make the scrollbar transparent.
You have an application that works terrible if you make the scrollbar transparent.
Transparent scrollbars are not intuitive.
You have an application that works terrible if you make the scrollbar transparent.
Transparent scrollbars are not intuitive.
There's a chat on the left side, right side shows media. If I allow scrollbars to render normally the whole site is split in 2, in the middle being a scrollbar, which looks bad especially if not overlay. I've considered not caring about it and just let the scrollbar, but it bothers me. It's my application anyway, the browser is not just a document reader anymore, it's an application framework (as well).
> If I allow scrollbars to render normally the whole site is split in 2, in the middle being a scrollbar, which looks bad especially if not overlay
Well that's your opinion. But I would rather see a scrollbar in the middle to show me that I can actually scroll something. Otherwise it's a hidden feature and hidden features are not features, they're bugs.
Well that's your opinion. But I would rather see a scrollbar in the middle to show me that I can actually scroll something. Otherwise it's a hidden feature and hidden features are not features, they're bugs.
On the contrary, I'm completely in favor of custom CSS scrollbars because it's unimaginable that websites could do worse than modern OSes already do when it comes to scrollbars. If anyone here has a time machine, immediately after you've finished killing Hitler may I recommend that you gently persuade Jony Ive away from the terrible decision to make scrollbars hidden, low contrast, and impossibly thin.
Personally, I like the Apple ones. I’m partially sighted, so I should probably want the stronger visual design, but I don’t.
What I prefer is consistency with the OS. My OS is my main tool for interacting with the digital realm. My life would be easier if the conventions were more evenly applied. Custom scrollbars concern me that my OS defaults are being overriden: will the field scroll at the expected speed; can I flick it and catch it as I’m used to; is the scale expressive of content size?
Custom scrollbars tell me that the developer doesn’t care about me, they care more about their brand manager and their pay check. This suggests the product they represent wont suit me.
Along with intrusive pop-ups, subscription overlays, and “we value your privacy”, it’s a clear sign I should not engage with that provder.
What I prefer is consistency with the OS. My OS is my main tool for interacting with the digital realm. My life would be easier if the conventions were more evenly applied. Custom scrollbars concern me that my OS defaults are being overriden: will the field scroll at the expected speed; can I flick it and catch it as I’m used to; is the scale expressive of content size?
Custom scrollbars tell me that the developer doesn’t care about me, they care more about their brand manager and their pay check. This suggests the product they represent wont suit me.
Along with intrusive pop-ups, subscription overlays, and “we value your privacy”, it’s a clear sign I should not engage with that provder.
Is it possible to configure Firefox to ignore custom scroll bars? I haven’t noticed many at all.
IMO it is a dumb feature, but there’s no harm in having it in CSS for people who want it, as long as the rest of us can ignore it.
IMO it is a dumb feature, but there’s no harm in having it in CSS for people who want it, as long as the rest of us can ignore it.
> Modifying the scrollbar via CSS means the scrollbar will effectively disappear when a Forced Color mode theme is applied. Again, if you can’t see it, you won’t know it’s there.
> Much like with Forced Colors Mode, custom CSS scrollbars will not honor the presence of an enabled Increased Contrast Mode.
These both just sound like browser bugs. In those modes, of course the browser should be ignoring or further modifying scrollbar colour changes.
MDN on scrollbar-color: “Note: @media (forced-colors: active) sets scrollbar-color to auto.” (However, I can’t find any spec citation for this, not in Media Queries Level 5 or CSS Scrollbars Styling Module Level 1.)
—⁂—
Here’s my take:
• Don’t use scrollbar-color on the document area, but treat this outermost scrollbar as browser chrome. In the early days of scrollbar-color it helped to set a suitable color-scheme setting in order to reliably get light or dark scrollbars as appropriate, but I don’t think any browser really needs that any longer (though it’s still a good idea, especially for other controls).
• It’s OK to use scrollbar-color on scroll areas within the document, so long as you maintain suitable contrast. Transparent tracks are a little risky, but at least acceptable in most inner scroll areas.
• On scrollbar-width, there’s a reason the values are `auto | thin | none`. As the spec says <https://w3c.github.io/csswg-drafts/css-scrollbars/#scrollbar...>: “The primary purpose of this property is not to allow authors to chose a particular scrollbar aesthetic for their pages, but to let them indicate for certain small or cramped elements of their pages that a smaller scrollbar would be desirable.” If you have a scrolling sidebar, for example, `scrollbar-width: thin` is completely reasonable. Other than that, there’s nothing useful to touch.
• Never use the older ::-webkit-scrollbar* pseudoelements (which are the only way to get things like 1px wide scrollbars, like the article speaks of). Their degree of control was a mistake <https://w3c.github.io/csswg-drafts/css-scrollbars/#out-of-sc...>, and their implementation never got beyond half-baked anyway, so that touching them at all harms scrollbar accessibility on at least Windows with non-overlay scrollbars (you lose the arrows at the ends).
• With all of these new scrollbar CSS properties, note how thoroughly they’re defined as hints. If certain accessibility modes make scrollbar tweaks break things, that’s very probably the browser’s fault. And it’s an unhappy situation when authors have to consider browser bugs (though it certainly does happen sometimes).
> Much like with Forced Colors Mode, custom CSS scrollbars will not honor the presence of an enabled Increased Contrast Mode.
These both just sound like browser bugs. In those modes, of course the browser should be ignoring or further modifying scrollbar colour changes.
MDN on scrollbar-color: “Note: @media (forced-colors: active) sets scrollbar-color to auto.” (However, I can’t find any spec citation for this, not in Media Queries Level 5 or CSS Scrollbars Styling Module Level 1.)
—⁂—
Here’s my take:
• Don’t use scrollbar-color on the document area, but treat this outermost scrollbar as browser chrome. In the early days of scrollbar-color it helped to set a suitable color-scheme setting in order to reliably get light or dark scrollbars as appropriate, but I don’t think any browser really needs that any longer (though it’s still a good idea, especially for other controls).
• It’s OK to use scrollbar-color on scroll areas within the document, so long as you maintain suitable contrast. Transparent tracks are a little risky, but at least acceptable in most inner scroll areas.
• On scrollbar-width, there’s a reason the values are `auto | thin | none`. As the spec says <https://w3c.github.io/csswg-drafts/css-scrollbars/#scrollbar...>: “The primary purpose of this property is not to allow authors to chose a particular scrollbar aesthetic for their pages, but to let them indicate for certain small or cramped elements of their pages that a smaller scrollbar would be desirable.” If you have a scrolling sidebar, for example, `scrollbar-width: thin` is completely reasonable. Other than that, there’s nothing useful to touch.
• Never use the older ::-webkit-scrollbar* pseudoelements (which are the only way to get things like 1px wide scrollbars, like the article speaks of). Their degree of control was a mistake <https://w3c.github.io/csswg-drafts/css-scrollbars/#out-of-sc...>, and their implementation never got beyond half-baked anyway, so that touching them at all harms scrollbar accessibility on at least Windows with non-overlay scrollbars (you lose the arrows at the ends).
• With all of these new scrollbar CSS properties, note how thoroughly they’re defined as hints. If certain accessibility modes make scrollbar tweaks break things, that’s very probably the browser’s fault. And it’s an unhappy situation when authors have to consider browser bugs (though it certainly does happen sometimes).
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Someone re-writes this article every few years. It's not the first time that somebody has pointed out that customising the scrollbar isn't a great idea
the OP mentioned apple's headaches with the "disappearing" scrollbar, yes I often experienced that in Apple's own site, iTunes Connect (manage App submissions, rejections/comments etc). Disappearing scrollbars on TextArea with large amounts of text made is very easy to miss whole paragraphs of text, can be very costly.
I'm for "Customizing the UI", as long as it helps the User get the most out of the site.
I'm for "Customizing the UI", as long as it helps the User get the most out of the site.
CSS scrollbars… those take me back to my middle school experimentations with HTML back when interactive web pages were called "dynamic HTML"
What would be nice would be some sort of solemn undertaking that the presence or absence of a browser scrollbar will never alter the placement of the content.
Worst thing is when interaction with scrollbar is considered enough to enable video autoplay and another annoying features.
I wonder if there is a way to override the entire web with a custom stylesheet plugin like Stylus for Firefox.
so first about size is what 5 lines of css when most companies use react or any other framework. And every website has different theme, style, buttons, checkboxes so what let's don't use css at all then? and user can install extension that let them override css.
Did he mention scrollbars in the content of the webpage? Or is it all only about single main scrollbar?
I need to follow in your footsteps and write why websites shouldn’t prevent autofill.
Worse even than this is that Microsoft Sway implements its own custom _scrolling_!
Does firefox ignore this? The codepen example doesn't seem to work for me.
"AppWeb" and "DocWeb" should be 2 different platforms.
3000 word like article :DDDDDDDDDDDDDD
a website should be obvious to scroll without scrollbars
The OS gets the scrollbar wrong so often that as a user and developer I’ve found I need to take care of it.
It’s fine relying on the “platform” but the platforms are just criminal cartels holding users and apps hostage.
Two specific examples, just on scroll bars. I’ve found the platform failing to support dark mode and failing to support mixed high DPI scenarios. Both of these failings result in poor accessibility and real pain for real users.
As a lowly app developer I don’t have the resources to do it perfectly for my users. But the OS is failing badly enough that I end up having to do the work. It’s not out of vanity, which is the only reason TFA author can imagine.
It’s fine relying on the “platform” but the platforms are just criminal cartels holding users and apps hostage.
Two specific examples, just on scroll bars. I’ve found the platform failing to support dark mode and failing to support mixed high DPI scenarios. Both of these failings result in poor accessibility and real pain for real users.
As a lowly app developer I don’t have the resources to do it perfectly for my users. But the OS is failing badly enough that I end up having to do the work. It’s not out of vanity, which is the only reason TFA author can imagine.
Making a custom scrollbar because it doesn't support dark mode is worse for accesibility overall. Your custom scrollbar likely won't work well with tools disabled used for scrolling that isn't the mouse.
I am a user who uses accessibility tools and is stating that the operating system is failing in both the size and the tone of the scroll bar. Btw, trivialising dark mode is not cool. I have photosensitivity at times and when it’s bad the pain of items appearing bright coloured is excruciating. Just so you know. (Special shout out to platforms who flash a huge white rectangle before rendering the dark mode content. It’s like pins in each eye.)
The confidence with which you state “is worse for accessibility overall” is just breath taking.
Had you written “may be” instead of “is” and “in many circumstances” rather than “overall” - then I would understand that you were thinking about this.
But no you’re claiming perfect knowledge of a situation that you are not inside and which I am inside.
The operating system gets it very wrong in very many circumstances. I end up having to provide - configurable - alternatives to overcome some of the egregious mistakes.
If the operating systems start to get it right- awesome I can make the overrides opt in not opt out.
The confidence with which you state “is worse for accessibility overall” is just breath taking.
Had you written “may be” instead of “is” and “in many circumstances” rather than “overall” - then I would understand that you were thinking about this.
But no you’re claiming perfect knowledge of a situation that you are not inside and which I am inside.
The operating system gets it very wrong in very many circumstances. I end up having to provide - configurable - alternatives to overcome some of the egregious mistakes.
If the operating systems start to get it right- awesome I can make the overrides opt in not opt out.
As a user, I prefer for my OS to do things my OS does, including styling my widgets. My scrollbars, my scrolling behavior, window chrome, all of it… whether it’s good or bad or right or wrong, that’s between me and my OS.
As a user, I hate when web apps mess with scrolling. It breaks affordances I use, like tapping at the top of the screen to jump to the top of the page, or home/end keys on desktop. It is inevitably a worse experience than native scrolling, no matter how hard you try. Facebook mobile web for example is basically unusable right now because it’s trying to overthink scrolling. If Facebook can’t get it right, I’m not sure what makes anyone else think they can.
And why would anyone want to? Honestly! Microsoft and Apple have already done all that work.
As for scroll bars and other widgets, again, right or wrong, that’s not for some web site to mess with. Sorry if the developer doesn’t like the way it looks… they only have to deal with it while working on it. As a user, I am stuck with the developer’s choices, even if they override my own choices, which I’ve made in my OS, which is where those choices belong.
If you’re going to clobber native experience, I would argue, don’t do it unless there is absolutely no other option. Corollary: there is always another option.