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by ayushnix 1322 days ago
I find both solutions to be flawed. The traditional scrollbar introduces layout shift when going from one page without a scrollbar to a page with a scrollbar. The new overlay scrollbar is sometimes harder to click and activate, especially in Chromium. Firefox's overlay scrollbar seems to do the right thing. The reading progress bars are a distraction and probably harmful to one's attention span and reading ability.

I guess scrollbar-gutter can fix the traditional scrollbar but then people have to give up using their fancy banners in headers. I'm (mostly) fine with Firefox's overlay scrollbar for now.

1 comments

At least on a desktop we have enough horizontal space to always display the vertical scrollbar, which solves all issues. But even without that, the layout difference between pages with or without scrollbar is so tiny that IMO its a nonissue.

Mobile is a tricky tradeoff. There I am mostly used to Firefox, which has a tiny overlay scrollbar that is 50% grey making it almost invisibile in most cases.

> But even without that, the layout difference between pages with or without scrollbar is so tiny that IMO its a nonissue.

It annoyed to me enough to make me activate overlay scrollbar on Firefox and inject custom CSS with scrollbar-gutter on Chromium. Otherwise, when moving from a repo home page (without a scroll bar) to the another page (let's say the contents a folder with a scrollbar), the box containing the contents of the repo experiences layout shift.

This is still an issue on GitHub and many other sites.

> Mobile [...] Firefox

… and unfortunately it's not draggable, either.