[expazl]

> Ok so a lot of folks have fine motor control problems.

The scrollbar is not there so you can use it to change your scroll position. It's there solely for the purpose of visualizing what your current scroll position is. Every device and every application should have a way to scroll that does not rely on the assumption that people will hunt out some narrow area of their screen and hold it while dragging to scroll. That's just a horrible interaction that never should have been considered in any setting. At least that's my opinion.

[deepspace]

I am going to disagree strongly there. The alternative way to scroll is, in most cases, the mouse scroll wheel. And that gets tedious (and strenuous for some people) really fast when the document gets large. I absolutely need the ability to use the scroll bar to change my position in a document.

[joseda-hg]

I can't remember the last time I had to resort to manually scrolling by clicking the scrollbar

In order of use, I scroll one click, middle-click and drag (Best for constant movement), use the dedicated keys, use arrows, or use vimium bindings (Which I try to avoid, because I'd prefer to not get used to non-CUA keybindings on programs I might have to use in other computers)

[pseudalopex]

Dragging the scroll indicator is much faster than some of these. And more reliable. And easier to control than middle click and drag.

[pohuing]

One Alternative would be autoscroll. Ie clicking with the middle mouse button and then moving the mouse up or down. The distance and direction between the click position and the cursor controls the scroll speed.

But it feels like this is primarily a windows thing for some reason. Firefox supports it cross platform but that's about it

[pseudalopex]

Many people have trouble controlling the speed. And most Apple mice didn't have a middle button.

[atom058]

There are dedicated keys for this on most keyboards: PgUp, PgDown, Spacebar (context dependent)

[MagicMoonlight]

If that were true then they wouldn’t go to the effort of making it draggable

[tomjakubowski]

You're right that clicking and dragging the indicator part of the scroll bar to scroll around is silly and nobody really ever did it.

But the scroll bar isn't just for visualization and it was commonly used to jump around the page - you'd click in the "negative space" on the scroll bar, which would then scroll the page to that position.

[tigen]

In days of yore, when scrollbars were fat and mice lacked wheels, we did indeed drag them.

[accoil]

I drag the indicator when scanning a document. It's only a single click, and then I move the mouse to part of the document I'm interested in (and then can keep moving it if I want to look at another part). If I was to do this with negative space it would be multiple clicks (and even then negative space clicks tend to jump to the position, whereas a drag will show everything in between).

Though I find it's more common for a negative space click to just move a page and not jump to the location, so maybe that's influenced me.