[protastus]

Apple, Android, Windows. Every OS has jumped into this bandwagon. Usability keeps deteriorating at the expense of aesthetics.

I resent designers for messing up user experience, pushing the industry away from good solutions that were discovered and implemented decades ago.

[rocket_surgeron]

For me personally, a persistent scrollbar is as relevant to usability as the {x,y} coordinates that old Unix windowing systems like MWM or CDE used to draw whenever you moved or resized a window.

There were many, MANY extremely intelligent and highly technical people who got into very long flame wars when the feature of displaying the X and Y coordinates of the center of a window and the corners whenever it was moved, was removed.

And now it seems silly.

What use case is there? Knowing all of the time how much of a webpage is left below the bottom of a window? That is not relevant information to most people and becomes immediately available as soon as you move your fingers 1mm to scroll through the contents of a window.

Quickly jumping position in a long window? Normal users don't care and power users use HOME, END, PGUP, PGDOWN or other keyboard shortcuts because it is very highly unlikely that you know the exact percentage of a window you need to scroll through and the time taken removing your hands from the keyboard exceeds the time saved by knowing that direct percentage anyways.

I have a Model M and fancy-pants trackball but the vast, overwhelming majority of users are interacting with their computers using a touchpad or their fingers. To the point that mouse users should be deprioritized to enhance the experience of the majority.

Removing persistent scrollbars puts the needs of the many ahead of the few.... or the one.

[StewardMcOy]

I see this framed as a touch vs. mouse debate often, and it's understandable since non-persistent scrollbars originated on smartphones, but I think even touch interfaces would benefit from persistent scrollbars.

At my work, we recently had a bug filed where a lot of users were reporting that one of the pages didn't have all the controls it ought to. It turned out that those users needed to scroll down to get to those controls, but they didn't realize they could scroll. At the common viewport size they were using, the page looked complete. It didn't look like there was anything to scroll.

If there was a persistent scrollbar, the user could have easily seen that there was more content to scroll to.

Now, you could say that the design of that page was bad if users had to scroll to important controls, and you might have a good case. In this case, the controls weren't the most important part of the page, and modern design favors decreasing density. There are always going to be cases where users aren't going to realize they can scroll.

Windows phone tried to solve this is in the most disorienting way possible by making sure things were always getting cut off on the sides that you could scroll, but other than that blip in history, there's been no standard replacement for the scrollbar for informing users they can scroll.

[hulitu]

" What use case is there?"

I need to scroll the damn thing. Not with the mouse scroll ( too rough) not with the keyboard ( i don't want to lose keyboard focus from the current element). I just need to scroll. I don't have time to wait until the scrollbar appears, i don't want to click for it to appear. I just want it there.

[v0idzer0]

All you have to do is hover the area where it lives and it appears. You’d have to hover the area anyway to touch it. It’s entirely inconsequential to usability and obviously looks significantly better

[grosswait]

Sometimes the scroll bar that appears when hovering is so thin one must move back and forth to zero in on it while it disappears until you’ve finally found the spot. I would much prefer it just stay visible rather than play hide and seek.

[ksaj]

Agreed. Also I read a lot of long text pages, so it's nice to see the scroll bar as a position marker.

[v0idzer0]

You can make them stay visible in settings

[rawTruthHurts]

> What use case is there?

If I don't see a scrollbar I don't scroll down. A scrollbar indicates that there is content below the fold.

[samemail88]

I think Apple was the first to jump on this bandwagon. The others are following along.