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by deepspace 972 days ago
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.
3 comments

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)

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

Many people have trouble controlling the speed. And most Apple mice didn't have a middle button.
There are dedicated keys for this on most keyboards: PgUp, PgDown, Spacebar (context dependent)