[ziari]

The author shares my frustrations with Apple's scroll bar gimmicks. Honestly, I'm surprised that Sublime-style minimaps haven't been adopted by web browsers, word processors, and other mainstream software.

For example, the linked blog post only occupies half of the vertical space on the webpage. The rest is showing comments. So, while reading the article, it's impossible for me to assess how much is actually left... without laboriously scrolling down, hunting for the end of the post, glancing at the scroll bar, and setting a mental checkpoint near the midpoint.

Scroll bars are practically meaningless because they reflect a property of the webpage (instead of the real content therein). This problem is even worse on websites with "infinite scroll" UIs that cause the scroll bar to abruptly change size/location without user input.