[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.