Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by atrettel 900 days ago
One UI feature that I love that Firefox lets you change is the scrollbars. I forget the precise settings, but I set them up so that they are always present and always big enough for me to see how far down a page I am (yes, like I'm using Windows 95!). That might only be something that matters to a few people, but the fact that it is customizable to that level is one of Firefox's greatest strengths.
1 comments

This sounds great, but for web developers I feel it’s a risky change if you want to see your sites as your users do.
Web developers should be in the habit of checking against many different configurations anyway. I've lost track of the number of times that I've stumbled on a scrollable area that wasn't meant to be scrollable, which would have been caught if the developer had opened the site in the browser with always on scroll bars.
You raise a good point. Fortunately, I'm not a web developer but I will keep your point in mind in case I do any web development later.

From a web development standpoint, the scrollbars do seem to be an ignored feature for a lot of web pages. Adding scrollbars actually fixes a lot of issues with some sites. For example, some sites often have a frame inside of another frame, and this reveals the scrollbars for both frames. If I were to use my mouse wheel, I might scroll down inner frame or the outer frame, and I wouldn't know which one would be activated until I try, but with the scrollbars on, I always know which one is which. This was a surprise benefit to this change.

That's why I still develop using pluginless Chrome, even though I've always used Firefox as my default browser.