>gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface overlay-scrolling false
"Don't rely on gsettings. They are private and users are not supposed to be setting them theirselves. Don't complain when they suddenly stop working." -- every gtk dev I've ever talked to.
That said, I've applied those firefox about:config fixes and it's much better. Whew.
gsettings don't just apply to gnome desktop environment. They impact the entire gtk ecosystem of dozens of desktop environments and innumerable gtk programs.
Whenever I read a piece like this or another UX blog, it just becomes so obvious how little we care about a11y.
“Good” (as in accessible) design is pretty boring and decluttered compared to most modern expectations of web apps. I read Adam Silver’s book on forms and came away realizing that we’re doing it entirely wrong from an a11y standpoint but that’s just not a priority.
Numerical ones don’t seem to exist outside of IT, but other fields do the same strategy of abbreviating common long words by keeping only a letter or two. The non-numerical way is to just replace the rest with an “x” like “txn” for “transaction” in finance or “pax” for “passengers” in transportation or “sx” for “symptoms” in medicine.
> Is it still okay to make "nothing sucks like a VAX" jokes?
Please!
I was a stage II CS student learning assembly programming on a VAX simulator. Wrote a VAX simulator, in VAX assembly then ran VAX assembly programmes on it.
I claim your time would be better spent figuring out why it makes you unhappy and working out how to not mind it - this is a somewhat common means of abbreviation, and you'll probably encounter it again.
It's a word that starts with a, then 11 letters, then ends in y. The format is not hard to grok once you understand it then context and sheer elimination leaves only a few choices
edit: I will say this is a bad example because looking it up there is 40+ words that fit this description so maybe I am biased by experience. i18n works better but I think my point is no longer correct.
It's a longstanding abbreviation for "accessibility", along the same lines of i18n being an abbreviation for internationalisation. There's the first letter, and the last letter, and between them a count of the number of letters elidded.
The word you're looking for is "jargon". It refers to niche-specific words that are hard for outsiders to understand, and isn't just tech-specific. "Lingo" is a much broader term.
True. I was grasping at straws for the right word. Thank you.
The Greek/Latin/<jargon> structure should be standard or taught in schools in some capacity.
Basic programming concepts are popular, useful and should probably be taught as a sub category of English... given that programming is supposed to be a language, and pull its roots (somewhat) from English or "natural language".
Society would produce higher quality code if the basic concepts were considered as a literacy requirement for children.
It's really uncommon to see, I wouldn't call it "long-standing" at all. It's really obscure jargon that even most technical people don't know. At least "i18n" is widespread enough that most people will see it, though that's stupid too because it's incredibly unclear. I had no idea what it meant until this year despite having seen it for a decade or more.
I would hope (read: pray) that on HN a11y isn't jargon. On a thread about scrollbars (i.e., UI and UX) a11y should be as accessible as saying UI or UX.
Again, obscure and jargon are a function of context.
Spitballing...Keep in mind, without context, "accessibility" is also jargon in the sense not everyone is going to know what and how that means. My mum certainly wouldn't understand a11y, I agree. But she also would understand "accessibility" or even "website accessibility."
Full disclosure: I'm 5x more picky than the next person when it comes to comms. Absolutely, words matter. But one of the foundations to comms is context. The context in this case is HN.
It’s not exactly wrong from a business standpoint. The math just comes out that a business does better when they do all the things they can’t do if they want an accessible website. Dark patterns, especially, are very anti-accessibility.
Laws to mandate accessibility, laws to mandate provable correctness, laws to mandate fairness, and laws to break up the big, for only the big could satisfy all the other laws.
No reference I know of. I'm just struggling to balance on the one hand each field's demand to be taken seriously (and since the public doesn't take them seriously, experts appeal to legislators for validation), and on the other hand the Brandeisian push against Bigness that arises after decades of regulatory capture.
I have no stake in a11y, but I hear the same appeal re software correctness and statistical significance and many other individually reasonable asks, that nevertheless add up to a gridlock of regulations.
The best part is that every website now feels it necessary to completely override the unusable skinny built-in browser scroll bar, then add a useless, non-interactive horizontal progress bar at the top of the screen instead.
As I'd commented on the Fediverse thread discussing this post, the distraction of having a horizontal animation responding to a vertical movement is absolutely maddening.
On desktops, I'll remove that horizontal bar via uBlock Origin's element remover or a Stylus CSS rule.
Maybe the solution is to improve the accessibility tools, not hack scrollbars. Assistive technologies should not just try to emulate the computer, but try to also use their specific strengths. For example, shouldn't eyetrackers be able to use blink or eyeroll gestures, or have a virtual "scroll down" "button" (focus target) underneath the screen?
> Maybe the solution is to improve the accessibility tools, not hack scrollbars
I doubt you meant it, but your post reads like you're advocating less-abled people purchase (often expensive) eye-trackers instead of making scrollbars generally more usable for everyone.
The article specifically mentions eye tracker users as an affected group.
Everybody who tries to actually use the scroll bar as a handle (rather than a non-interactive position indicator for use with the other scrolling methods) would have a problem, because they're not really meant to be used that way and most people don't use them that way (which is why they keep shrinking).
Unfortunately the article doesn't mention how people who don't use an eye tracker, can't use a scroll wheel/touchscreen-dragging (or adapted replacement for either!), but could use a "normal-sized" scrollbar, are actually interacting with their devices. I imagine that overlapping group to be rather small.
> ...how do you think people scrolled documents in Word before mice had scroll-wheels?
With the page up and page down keys, mostly, though you could drag the scrollbar.
Not sure about Word, but I believe many apps had a keyboard + mouse combination that enabled scrolling with any mouse movement without interacting with the scollbar, as well.
Very painfully. Have you ever noticed how fountains in cities are increasingly impractical to fill water jugs from? (Just because eons ago it was meant to be used that way, doesn't mean it still is.)
That actually gives me a reverse accessibility problem on iOS, because I will try to drag-scroll at the edge of the screen but accidentally grab the scrollbar, which goes in the opposite direction.
My god... I've been using iOS for ten years and your comment just made me realize you can actually press onto and grab the razor-thin scrollbar that disappears about a second of idle time. What a farce.
I don’t think this is UX/UI designers not knowing/caring about accessibility. It’s their bosses saying the tiny scrollbar is preferred because it sells 20% more due to the aesthetics being better. Who cares about the 0.5% of disabled people that weren’t likely to buy your app anyway.
Same for browsers, FF may care about accessibility, but they won’t lose the browser wars (bit of a moot point by now, but eh) because most people like Chrome’s tiny scrollbars.
It would be more sensible to show them a current Windows. Or Windows 7. Or a Mac with visible scroll bars. Or ask them if they would like Windows 11 more with the scroll bar size setting removed.
Exactly, a current UI would be far from optimal on 30 years old hardware. Furthermore it would look alien, not in a good way, even if Windows 10 would probably feel old fashioned to us in 1995, because of the flat look that was forced when hardware was more limited in the 80s. It's almost a Windows 2 with a few more colors and less borders. Check this site for screenshots https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win203
Perhaps, but I think a large part of this is designers assuming the scrollbar isn't actually for scrolling anymore, and treating is as simply a position indicator. Which for users who exlusively use a trackpad/touchscreen/scrollwheel for scrolling, it is. Ignorance tends to be the largest cause of accessibility issues.
It would be extremely useful for touchscreen users as well, a scrollbar lets you scroll a whole document (and go near specific points) in an instant instead of swiping like an idiot for a minute.
And for trackpad and scrollwheel users it's the same, I absolutely adore chiral scrolling but you still need to use the scrollbars sometimes (or often).
All these things only replace the arrows of scrollbars (enhancing them with some speed control), but the arrows are just a tiny and stupid aspect of scrollbars (I don't remember ever seeing someone using them).
> It’s their bosses saying the tiny scrollbar is preferred because it sells 20% more due to the aesthetics being better.
I think we need to stop shifting blame to "the bosses." The bosses are (generally) not getting involved with the minutia of how scroll bars work or what color they are, or how accessible they are. This problem falls squarely in the lap of 1. the UX designers who think scrollbars are icky and get in the way of their pure vision of the app and 2. the developers who don't push back on the madness.
Yes, I've had "bosses" who annoyingly micromanaged the UX of our product, and yes, it's irritating when that happens. But I highly doubt it's the general case. Designers have run amok in the never-ending quest to fill out their portfolios, and accessible things like thick scrollbars, large fonts, contrasting bold colors, and an information architecture that lends itself to screen readers get in the way of their sterile, minimalist aesthetic.
But it's not just disabled people. I'm not disabled, but curse the scrollbar and window frame situation every day. Their minimization makes actually using the UI a greater pain in the ass.
I run into so many websites that I think are completely broken because they have a scollable popover or some other weird element, but it's impossible to tell that there is content because the scroll bar is hidden on this small interior frame.
Absolutely infuriating. I blame iOS and macOS for encouraging this insanity and starting the fashion trend, and tangentially whoever pushed along this whole "flat" UI trend that makes it so hard to guess at what is what.
UI is communication, and UI designers have decided that mumbling is cool.
In the context of the original iPhone at least, hiding the scrollbar when not scrolling makes some amount of sense… when your screen is 3.5" in size and your goal is to render content with "desktop" fidelity, there's not a whole lot of room for a scrollbar, plus most people aren't going to be interacting with the scrollbar.
For desktop OSes where the smallest screen being used is much larger on the other hand there's not much of a good reason to hide them.
It looks nicer + you can just use the scroll wheel. A lot of the UI affordances lost over the last decade or two are unfortunate, but complaints about scroll bars seem to be purely baby duck syndrome.
I don't mind having them hidden as an option, but there should be an OS user level override that all apps and sites *obey*. macOS has the first half covered, but electron apps and some browsers have yet to cover the latter half.
As the article says, not everyone can use a scroll wheel, and not everyone even has a scroll wheel or touchpad. I personally find using mouse scroll wheels quite painful due to RSI caused from decades of mouse abuse. Yet, designers find scroll bars and up-and-down scroll arrows icky so fuck me, I guess. :(
Obviously not, but you also shouldn't expect the whole world to be designed around your needs. If you have difficulty using the expected input method, you should use alternatives with the same functionality, not expect others to redesign their apps in your preferred way.
Often, you don't even need to lift a finger, design-wise or implementation-wise, to have good accessibility. The system-wide or toolkit defaults are usually quite accessible right out of the box. macOS's horrible disappearing scrollbars being a huge exception.
Most of the terrible designs and accessibility problems stem from software going out its way to write custom controls or force controls to look and behave in a non-default way. It's not an afterthought--people are deliberately adding code to make their software worse.
"Accessibility" here refers to one person's very particular disability. You can't possibly predict the entire gamut of disabilities people might face. Trying to do so "first and foremost" is utter madness.
Nobody's asking you to predict anything, they're asking you to leave the functional design elements of a scrollbar alone and not fuck them up. Probably if you rent an angle grinder and remove the handrails from the steps at your local library it'll look nicer, but you don't do that, because there's a good reason for those steps to have handrails.
Designing with accessibility in mind makes software better for everyone, period.
You design a clear, visible, distinctive scroll bar and buttons? Boom, you've catered to everyone with bad vision (for any reason: from blindness to eye surgery), reduced motor skills (for any reason: from arthritis to old age to hand injuries), non-technical users (so they don't have to hunt around the interface hoping to discover hidden features).
And this goes for everything in software.
Disability is a spectrum, and you yourself will be disabled in one way or another, multiple times, during the course of your life. Be it from old age, surgeries, injuries, strain from sport or mundane tasks like holding a baby.
There are a number of common disabilities. Everyone starts losing near vision just after 40, which works out to almost half of the people using a computer expected lifespan is around 78, and babies don't use computers). 10% of the population is color blind of some sort. Most people will have a broken arm sometime in their life (the only statistic I can find is 6 million people in the US break their arm every year: this could also be a few clumsy people breaking their arm several times per year and most don't ever. I think most people breaking their arm at some point seems more likely)
It does not look nicer. It looks more mysterious. Where in the list am I? Is there anything below to scroll to? Above? To the right, everyone's favorite?
And no, trying to scroll every control just to find this out is not my ideal of usability and comfort.
In an age of information overload, perhaps the mystery is exactly what we need.
We know the exact temperature and humidity outside, we have logs of the exact times that our smart lights turned on and off. Our watches tell us our heart rate throughout the day and even its variability. Our phones monitor how much we use them, and in which apps, and report back weekly. When I had outlook in the office, it would summarize how much time I spent in meetings, seemingly to increase my stress level one more notch.
The lack of a scroll bar returns mystery, but even more, it brings us back to a simpler time when we weren't overloaded by information such as "how much is left of this text?" or "is there a button hidden somewhere on this page that allows me to complete my task, or is the app just broken?"
These are the sorts of small joys that we miss in the Information Age.
It's so you can doomscroll for hours without realizing how much content you have consumed. It's pointless to know how much is left because the feed is infinite. You can't ever get to the bottom that a scroll bar would imply as new content is loaded.
It is an enabler of information overload, not a solution or respite.
(For humour purposes only:
Fuck me, I've been holding it wrong the whole time!)
On my desktops I've got more screen width than any of my open windows know what to do with, and they still want to skimp on scroll bar width. I can understand with mobile, but mobile design decisions are crowding out desktop usability. It's lazy and cheap but the market is monopolised enough that the approaching horizon can only look "no worse" at best.
> It looks nicer + you can just use the scroll wheel.
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder".
My work laptop does not have a "scroll wheel". There is a posibility to scroll using the touch pad but it is undocumented and hit or miss.
> UI designers have decided that mumbling is cool.
At risk of hijacking this complaint thread onto an even more inflammatory set of rails:
They may just be copying modern cinema. I can't watch many movies or TV shows these days without subtitles - even when the kids are quiet / sleeping / at school.
I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse. The tiny scrollbars with laughable contrast are in no way accessible to anyone. I've recently switched to using KDE with the Oxygen theme and it's a joy to use without any eye strain.
These scrollbars are absolutely pathetic, with no room for customisation. (good luck theming a locked-down application) It's blatant how UI designers don't give a damn about the users' needs, not even in FOSSland. I am not entirely sure why this is the case but it's a sad regression from the days when we had good-looking, functional, accessible and snappy software. Not locked-down, unthemable electron bullshit.
Also, we wouldn't need "dark mode" or the such if the UIs had any contrast and were legible.
> I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse.
We've hit peak usability about twenty years ago, in the Windows 2000 era. The screenshot in the article is actually from about that era, it's one of the early 10.x (10.3 I believe) OS X releases.
Arguably, Snow Leopard was peak interaction design. Just for the highly functional visual grouping of elements. (MacOS has drifted off from this quite a distance, since.)
Today in HN: A billion armchair rants about Windows 2000 being the best UI forgetting just how much it actually sucked at usability or accessibility features.
I'll have to admit that I don't know about its accessability features, but I was at least as productive in Windows 2000 and XP as I am in todays systems.
In Windows 10 i lost a lot of time because of UI bugs: double click registered on single mouse clicks, UI elements dissapearing when connecting monitors, no scrollbars, no window border, no titlebar.
My experience is 'developers' have no issue with scrollbars; it's the higherups and designers that find scrollbars antiquated and obsolete in a world with touchscreen devices.
> Also, we wouldn't need "dark mode" or the such if the UIs had any contrast and were legible.
Contrast is a factor yes, but the other thing that's happened with the flat UI epidemic is banishment of mid grays and light grays in favor of stark white and off-whites, making "light mode" much more bright looking than it had been previously. It's no wonder people were clamoring for dark mode after blinding flat UI had taken over.
Not only that but it seems like color from icons has gone - now we get black and white ones. I'd get it if these companies making the UX were small, because yes its super hard to deal with accessibility and different color blindness but I agree - we've lost anything but the extremest of the extreme colors.
The ironic thing about icons losing their color and detail is that it happened right as high DPI displays began to become commonplace in consumer hardware. We have these amazing screens with barely visible pixels and excellent color reproduction being wasted on rendering monochrome lines.
Monochrome lines are cool tho, ink or charcoal can be gorgeous, and “barely visible pixels” are genuinely needed to get them.
That aside, high dpi displays are still a rare sight on desktops, there’s not many of them and the aspect ratios and ancillary features are extremely limited.
>That aside, high dpi displays are still a rare sight on desktops
No, they aren't. ALL displays these days are high-dpi, when you compare to the 640x480 and 800x600 screens that were normal in the late 1990s. But the window managers back then were FAR better (in functionality and appearance) than what most of us use today.
> ALL displays these days are high-dpi, when you compare to the 640x480 and 800x600 screens that were normal in the late 1990s.
Leaving side your wilful misunderstanding of fairly standard concepts, no they are not: the monitors you are talking about were generally tiny, and the minor increase in median pixel density was largely counteracted by the blocky precision of LCD pixels.
In modern parlance, "high-DPI" or "HiDPI" does not refer to your 24" 1080p screen. That's solidly a "low-DPI" screen; it's perfectly usable with UI elements rendered at "1x".
There's also an increasing prevalence and popularity of e-ink displays. Though some of these are colour-capable, most are monochrome, and I've definitely had challenges negotiating apps and content which use colour as a key differentiator.
Is there actually an increasing prevalence and popularity of e-ink displays? I know there technically exists some "high refresh rate" e-ink screens these days (meaning you can get 10 FPS if you're comfortable with a whole lot of ghosting), but aren't e-ink screens still pretty much only used in dedicated e-book readers?
Personally, I think it's just that monochrome icons are fashionable. I can't imagine that the GIMP developers for example chose to make GIMP's icons monochrome because that works better on e-ink screens.
There's a wide range of e-ink tablets and displays available. Many of the tablets run Android and are largely the same as any other Android device. The displays can be used with any OS, obviously. There are also e-ink phones (smart and otherwise), watches, and other devices.
For text and graphics, you'd generally want to use a higher-quality, lower-refresh-rate mode. Which is to say that there's quite a bit of established UI/UX knowledge that wants a refresh. I've distilled a set of basic principles: persistence is free, pixels are cheap, paints are slow, colour is (mostly) nonexistent, and the more ambient light the better. Paginated-navigation (whole screen changes in one go), line-art, and dithered or halftoned images work relatively well, raster images not quite so much, though can be acceptable.
My argument here (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37869476>) is that across all OSes, and for the Web generally, being mindful of monochrome, low-refresh-rate displays is something that should be front-of-mind for UI/UX teams and design.
Many of these issues already exist, e.g., for documents which are likely to be printed on monochrome devices. Colour is useful where available, but it is not universally available.
(And that's before addressing issues such as colourblindness or other disability / accessibility considerations.)
My original comment was not at all specific to Apple (you'd introduced them to the discussion), other vendors, or any specific OS or application. Simply that monochrome and e-ink are increasingly concerns.
But since you raised the topic of Apple, and since, contrary to your initial statement that, broadly speaking, monochrome was "a display technology they never used", I'm both correcting the record, and noting that should there be a monochrome or e-ink prospect on Apple's roadmap, and further noting that Apple rather famously does not announce such roadmaps in advance, that flat/white would in fact fit with e-ink remarkably well.
What that has to say about whether or not Apple is contemplating any such move I am, of course, entirely ignorant.
Since decades being mindful of monochrome displays and color blindness meant selecting appropriate colors and using different shapes along with different colors. Removing color where available is not useful.
Any explanation of the anti color trend must explain Apple's participation. Especially because Microsoft and GNOME appeared to imitate Apple.
I did not say monochrome was a display technology Apple never used. You named e ink. And monochrome is not a display technology.
Other trends included more transparency in content areas, links almost unidentifiable without color, and other reliance on small shade differences. And Apple made all app icons the same shape. All worse for e ink.
One thing I just love about KDE is that when you right-click on an "empty" area of a scrollbar, it offers you options to go to the very top or the very bottom of whatever view you're seeing.
I seem to recall that something like QtCurve offered buttons to do that within the scrollbar.
If only everyone did that, many time wasted in scrolling would be saved and "go to the top" buttons in websites wouldn't exist
That sounds nice, but I'm using KDE right now and just tried it on several apps and it doesn't work. In Chrome, it just brings up the regular right-click menu the browser normally provides. In actual KDE apps, it does nothing.
... Ya know, I haven't thought about that before, but screens are a lot brighter now aren't they. I wonder how much of the dark mode thing is just that the old good defaults are now eye-burningly bright, so of course people don't like them as much.
Screens can get brighter now, but if your screen is too bright, that's entirely on you. Adjusting the brightness is trivial and you can even do it without using the buttons on the display (DDC/CI).
About 3 years ago, I actually did research about monitors before buying one, for the first time in my tech-using life (which started around 1990, as I recall). Up until that point, it was never a question of "what is the best monitor for my application?", but rather "what's the biggest, highest-resolution monitor in my (pitiful) price range, that Best Buy (or whoever) has on hand right now?"
It began for me 15 years or so ago when backlights started to make high-pitched noises and 16:10 monitors started to become less common. It’s been rough since for various reasons, but brightness not going low enough isn't something I've experienced as a widespread issue. SRGB mode is pretty dim at 120 cd/m², so monitors usually are able to go at least that low, and typically much lower.
I have a (marginally) HDR monitor, and I run Windows 10's HDR mode. Immediately it was noticeably blander than non-HDR, but I've quite grown to like it. I find it very pleasant to use for long stretches for work and such.
When I play games I get the vivid colors and contrast so all good.
Interesting, I have an HDR monitor but never tried actually using the HDR function. It does seem to make a difference and feels nicer on the eyes. I'll have to see how it affects games too.
"Too bright" depends entirely on the context. I control-tab and alt-tab like a maniac these days (might reduce that by getting a fourth display, used to think that would be excessive but the Overton window has shifted and I'm coming around on the idea).
The default UI here on HN features your username in #828282 on a background of #F6F6EF [1], a contrast ratio of 3.54:1. The up and downvote arrows are #999999 on #F6F6EF [2], a ratio of 2.62:1. On a high-brightness screen, these less-intense contrasts look great. And this is far from the only place with 'nice calm greys' that are intentionally used by designers to reduce eye strain.
I run Visual Studio in dark mode, and Windows Explorer in dark mode, and Notepad++ in dark mode, and Omron Sysmac Studio in dark mode, and Autocad Electrical in dark mode, and Alibre CAD at the default (light gray) theme, and they look great. I'm in a nice, bright office, with (4) daylight 4' T8 LED bulbs directly overhead, and a whiteboard as the backdrop to my monitors, so it's not like I'm a recluse in a dark cave. The monitor brightness is not wrong.
At least, it's not wrong until I win-right or alt-tab over an Excel document or an old version of Studio 5000, where the color profile is stuck at black text on a white background. Then I'm instantly blinded. I can't set half the monitor (just the part over the Excel spreadsheet) to the right contrast and brightness to make Excel acceptable, because then I can't see better-designed apps.
And don't get me started on opening up a movie or game after work's done. "Set your brightness so the logo is barely visible." Yeah, no. "Game of Thrones is a cinematic show and therefore you have to watch it like you’re at a cinema: in a darkened room." Wagner and Snyder are watching their productions on studio-grade OLEDs. I won't put a show on the integrated screen of my old Thinkpad or Precision laptops, I know those displays are trash (and they're small, I only put stuff that's easy to see on them), but no brightness setting on my relatively nice IPS LCDs can comfortably handle the diversity of content they're used to display.
This is something that has always boggled my mind.
>Gee, this stark white brightness is hurting my eyes, maybe I should turn down the brightness on my display...
>Nah, I'll just demand every single company completely overhaul the CSS and contrast of everything while begrudgingly suffering the eye-burning whiteness of companies that haven't yet overhauled their CSS
If everyone would design against properly calibrated monitors it would be fine, you could just set it to the standard calibration, but they don't so there is no universally good brightness you'd never need to change for. It's like webpage sizes, if everyone built and tested their UIs at the standard physical screen scaling then you would run into a lot less variance in website sizes.
If everyone had calibrated monitors and every app and website was the same brightness, yes.
Instead, it varies wildly, often for good reasons... and then switching windows exposes you to extreme shifts. E.g. switch between photograph editing and a giant white text document, nothing's gonna save you then - stuff that looks correct and good for photography is absurd when most of your screen is the same as the sun.
Calibration is one thing, perceived brightness of the whole screen with specific content is another. And it's heavily influenced by how many nits are available.
Calibration in this case isn't about providing "and so everything then looks like it's the same brightness, because it's calibrated" it's about "and so the same modifications can be applied to everything consistently, because it's all calibrated". I.e. just lowering the brightness a bit below the intended value now is impossible. One thing built on a monitor with it's brightness curve undercalibrated and one with its brightness curve overcalibrated will look two different kinds of wrong when shifted by such a transform. That would not be the case with calibrated sources, everything would shift in the same way and you're able to have it look "wrong" (i.e. darker, capped, brighter, whatever) exactly the way you want, consistently.
Taking it to the DPI example, having things built at a standardised DPI isn't about making everything appear the same physical size it's about making everything tuned against a consistent physical size for the exact same reason, default is always intended and your global adjustments are always consistently resulting in the source material being larger than intended or smaller than intended instead of "well, depends how uncalibrated the source was if it's still smaller or larger than intended".
> Calibration in this case isn't about providing "and so everything then looks like it's the same brightness, because it's calibrated" it's about "and so the same modifications can be applied to everything consistently, because it's all calibrated".
You seem to be assuming the commenter you replied to didn't know that. As I understood it, all they were saying is that advice about calibration is useless for people who don't do photo editing, but whose problem is exactly that different windows have such wildly varying brightness that switching from one to another often makes everything look either pitch dark or third-degree-interrogation light in your eyes.
Which category of people do you think there are more of? My bet is on the latter. They need... Well, if you don't want to call it "another kind of calibration", you're free to come up with another term.
Yeah - I'm glad Android finally has the "extra dim" mode to reduce that with oleds (only barely effective with LCDs), but it comes at the cost of awful contrast. Lower output is much better in comparison.
I like being able to see my phone in sunlight nowadays, but there have definitely been some tradeoffs.
screens output way more nits these days, I remember not being able to see a screen properly because a lamp was on due to the monitors only having 200ish nits, these days you can get +1000 nit monitors, this is especially true for HDR monitors
To play PS5 I bought a monitor instead of a TV, because the place where I had to install the screen in the rented apartment is tiny, and tiny TVs are just crap with tons of input lag. So I got a gaming LG monitor.
Many PS5 games, specially those with HDR support, offer help in adjusting the brightness, often in the form of showing a very dark and a very bright image side by side, and telling you to adjust your settings until both are visible.
I found out that no matter what I do, this never happens. In the end the best setting is when NEITHER are visible. If the dark image is visible, the screen is so bright it feels like staring into a flashlight. If the bright image is visible, the screen is so dark that I can't see the contents of the screen with my curtains open or the lights turned on. I can't wrap my head around how someone can make a screen be so crap.
Does being outside generally hurt your eyes? Most complaints about brightness of screens has to do with the contrast between it and ambient lighting. When I'm in a dark room a bright screen is going to be hard to use. In a well lit room it's not an issue. It's kind of why ambient light sensing is a nice feature.
True. I use my screen with 0% brightness during the day and I have to reduce contrast during the night (which leads to reduced colour depth). Using dark mode is unavoidable for this reason.
Display manufacturers should really not just look at the maximum brightness but also the minimum.
I've been using dark themes whenever possible for a few years now, but recently realized much of unpleasantness of light mode comes for me from it being too blue w.r.t. the ambient lighting conditions. Playing with the slider in "Night Color" under KDE or "Night light" under Windows does the trick.
But the SW sliders are much more convenient; say, at work the desirable blue light level varies quite a lot (e.g., a sunny afternoon with blinds half-closed vs. a rainy morning), and a smooth adjustment is very nice to have.
> It's blatant how UI designers don't give a damn about the users' needs, not even in FOSSland.
Especially with this new "don't theme my app" movement. It's really unfortunate. The issues with CSS stylesheets in GTK should be solved with replacing CSS with a better way to describe styles, not with just throwing it all away and not letting the user set their own themes.
There's also the consideration that a decent style sheet can be ~100 - 200 lines long. Yet I see ~5000 line css files that have so much custom formatting for JS frameworks that build everything with divs, rather than using semantic HTML5 which has accessibility baked in.
It seems like there's two wildly different ways that CSS gets used. In one style, a CSS class is a semantic category of things on the page, and the style sheet defines how it looks. In the other, a CSS class has no semantic meaning, and the style sheet defines a list of options to choose from. It's the difference between `<div class="user-comment>` and `<div class="bg-lt-gray-fg-dark-gray-bold-text">`.
The first type of CSS can be written succinctly, but the second cannot.
Honestly I want the app to just set its look exactly. I really don't care if different programs look slightly different as long as its internally consistent in app.
What I hate is installing a program that was designed for a KDE distro and because you run gnome all the icons are the same color as the background and alignments on things are whack.
Package it all up in a flatpak so it looks and works exactly the same on all distros. One complete and verified experience.
"One complete and verified experience." These words sound sickening to me. None of these have anything to do with accessibility, or respecting the user.
The user should be in control of his computer. That includes the programs on it. Locking it down so you can have "verified authentic design" is just straight-up user-hostile.
This is the main reason I switched to MacOS. Was sick of everything on Linux being contentiously broken out of the box with the excuse "Oh you are meant to just configure the icon colours and toolbar padding yourself"
The programs can still be open source so you can recompile with whatever look you want, but they should bundle a working experiance by default.
But linux users seem more obsessed with curating custom themes over having things actually work.
I shouldn't have to recompile something to customise it. Make the defaults whatever you want sure, but even if you don't provide GUI config, provide an environment variable or a config file. "just recompile it" is incredibly user-hostile.
And who will make sure that the program actually works properly in that one-off hacked up, “press spacebar to heat up CPU” configuration you have?
Linux userspace is buggy, and I think this very-minimalistic approach sort of grown out from frustration about that. And they may be right, maintainers really don’t have the resources to do much better, especially when most frameworks they depend on has their own share of fatal, almost impossible to fix bugs.
I disagree. The user has accessibility needs and preferences that the app developers necessarily can't know about. App developers shouldn't be trying to enforce styles/themes/icons on the user when they might be completely unusable depending on their needs. The inconsistencies between KDE and GNOME apps/themes are annoying, but that's a solvable problem.
"don't theme my app" is not about users theming their apps, but instead against distros theming by default and more importantly the expectation that you could theme every app with a generic theme.
Same difference. If you don’t support theming done by distros, you don’t support theming full stop.
I suspect even their attitude towards theming done by end-users is more akin to ‘well sure, if you insist, you have the full source code, I can’t stop you, but you’re on your own’ than considering it a fully supported configuration.
Hard disagree with your first paragraph. An application can have endless customization abilities, but still doesn't need to let the system choose a theme for it to support "full theming" as you put it.
There can also be legitimate reasons not to support it. On the top of my head, for example, the default theme being the most tested, etc., etc. In a perfect world, they'd all be tested and well integrated, but there's limited man power going around, and the world isn't perfect.
Distros SHOULD be theming all applications. Once thing a distro can do well is create a theme for their distro so everything looks the same.
Maybe distros are not doing a good job of this, but that is one thing they have the power to do. QT, GTK2, SDL, wxwidgets, and more toolkits I can't even think of should all fit together on my desktop and look the same. xfce, gnome, and kde all have some nice apps, they should mix and match. This is a HARD problem, but that isn't an excuse to not face it.
> Distros SHOULD be theming all applications. Once thing a distro can do well is create a theme for their distro so everything looks the same.
I would reject a distro that did this (unless I could disable it). But users should be able to make everything look the way that works the best for them.
I would also like to live in a world where it is easy for end-users and distros to theme apps. But with current technologies and cultural expectations this results in an untenable testing and support burden on app developers.
We could shift cultural expectations so that distro maintainers become the first tier of support for all app issues in their distro, and escalate issues to app developers if and only if they've confirmed that the issue is distro-agnostic. That would be sustainable for app developers but could be a heavy burden for small distro teams.
> This is a HARD problem, but that isn't an excuse to not face it.
Agreed, I just don't think it's the responsibility of app developers to solve.
"Dark mode" is needed in dark rooms, since screens don't autoadjust their backlight based on the room's white point.
The concept of "white point" is often spoken of in terms of color, but brightness very much does matter too. It is painful for there to be something (especially something large) brighter than "white".
**
That said, we should have automatic dark mode based in inverting HSL's "lightness" (this can trivially be done directly in RGB, just check the min and max color channel of the pixel, then adjust all channels to flip them), rather than requiring ad-hoc color schemes all over the place.
This is one thing Apple got right a veeeery long time ago. Every screen they have sold since like the mid 2000s, both integrated and standalone, has had auto brightness. I don’t understand why other manufacturers still can’t that right, to this day, no matter the price category. Even most non-Apple smartphones these days still suck at this.
I’m surprised Linux doesn’t have some ubiquitous “use the camera to do auto-brightness” option (pinging the camera on a proprietary OS would be creepy, but if it is open source…).
That wouldn’t work very well because pretty much every webcam has auto exposure adjustment. Also a camera is good at determining how much light is in the room behind you, not how much light is hitting the screen. There really is no substitute for a photodiode and a halfway decent control algorithm. It only costs a penny so there really is no excuse not to include one.
I know a lot of people who have covered their camera with tape. Some laptops even come with a physical shutter. This is something company policy often recommends - if the camera is physically covered an attacker can't see the next product we are working on.
When I buy a laptop, one of the things I'm looking for is that it doesn't have an integrated camera at all. It's happened sometimes that I can't find one, then I cover the camera with tape.
The Lunar dev has a variety of recipes for a hardware widget you can build which allows their macOS-only brightness-control app to implement adaptive brightness on any monitor that permits backlight control over DDC/CI. I'm sure a more-motivated and clever person than me could tap into that hardware and use it to drive ddcutil/ddccontrol outputs on Linux.
CRT monitors had easy dials to quickly adjust brightness and contrast. You almost did it automatically without thinking when you had developed the motor memory. Nowadays monitor controls are often fiddly and awkward. But I still use them to adjust brightness to the environment.
There are some tools out there that will allow you to bind hotkeys (or at least provide a widget) to send brightness-adjustment commands via DDC/CI over the HDMI/DP cable to your desktop monitor. This may improve your UX. My 2015 and 2021 Dell monitors both support the functionality, with differing degrees of finesse.
One thing that I've found interesting (in my 40's and slight astigmatism) is how the effects of eyesight show up in interfaces or where there's contrast with brightness/darkness.
In the physical world that'd be issues like bright points like car headlamps or street lights having a large corona/starburst, or if you're looking at a bright object against a dark background such as reading a book where it's lit in a darker room the 'bloom' will obscure what's behind it. On a screen with much brightness I'll get similar effects if there's contrast. I've been window shopping for a HDR display for a while now and wondering how much benefit I'd get out of it seeing as the main selling points are the brightness/contrast, especially when you're getting into the various forms of local dimming to present the media at its best.
For me, with (mostly-corrected) astigmatism and some (uncorrectable) higher-order aberration, dark on light is the only thing I can read fluently. The worst case is ‘black holes’ on a light page, as are fashionable for illustrating command line examples (and f—ing github's CI log view), especially combined with Las Vegas syntax colouring of varying brightness.
True, but not relevant and not a contradiction of the comment. Pannoniae says that the empirical decline in usability of software is attributable to changes in the UI and not attributable to changes in his eyes. The fact that changes in his eyes exist is not a refutation.
> we wouldn't need "dark mode" or the such if the UIs had any contrast and were legible
Have you tried dark mode in Windows 11? It turns the entire window bar black, if multiple window bars happen to overlap it is impossible to tell them apart visually. On top of that in some programs it also turns the close/min/max window buttons completely black unless hovered by the cursor!
Microsoft should fire everyone at the company who ever made a UX design decision - except for the people who made the Windows Phone 8 UI, their only consistent and intuitive UI in the last 15 years.
I use "dark" mode in Windows 11, but it turns the title bar a nice blue shade since I actually went and configured it (it's right next to the mode setting). I actually can't configure the color in "light" mode where it's always white if I recall, though.
The other criticisms are valid though, the last good Explorer UI was Windows 7.
Windows Phone was visually stunning. Thanks for reminding me of it!
I don't know what you mean about turning the window bar black. Did you set the theme to "high contrast"? I've used dark mode on windows since it became an OS feature and never had that problem.
Microsoft's UX has been poor since Win8, but not for graphical reasons. 10 and 11 look great out of the box - far better than any other OS I've seen, although tbf I haven't done much distro-hopping.
The first thin I do on MacOS is turn on the scroll bars. Yes, MacOS Has them set as "Only Show When Scrolling" by default, which is probably the most ridiculous setting.
I saw those fat candy looking aqua scrollbars in the linked article and I immediately thought how great OS X used to look and work. Truly sad the mess macOS is now.
Not getting it. I mean, if Mac OS lets you configure scroll bars (and I haven't noticed a problem with the defaults so far either) that's much much more than can be said about gnome isn't it? Where gnome theming has gone from black magic in v3 to ... anathema in v4.
It seems like most people who scroll use touch, wheel, or other non-scroll-bar interfaces, and the scroll bars are just a visual indicator of document size and position while navigating it. I know I do— and have for 20 years unless I was using a shitty laptop without a scrolling input method. Maybe unless I'm scrolling through literally millions of lines of text, which is infrequent enough that I'd prefer to have them hidden and revealable by scrolling a bit.
Not having them take up screen real estate and working with most people's usage styles while being configurable for others is the right decision. The problem is systems and applications that don't let you configure them.
People talk about accessibility and their preferences like they are absolute truths— it's a lot more complex. Not having scroll bars sucks for people that never got comfortable with other scrolling input methods and people who use sight interfaces, for example. They couldn't possibly be less relevant to people who use screen readers, and as an input method rather than an Univision visual indicator, only slightly more relevant to people on phones and tablets. Phone and tablet usage has outpaced regular computer usage for quite some time, and that informs users interaction style. Adding visible UI elements adds cognitive load, and for people who never worked with scroll bars out of necessity, they're just another bulky animated distraction on the screen. Most younger users would probably think them about as useful as an always-visible on-screen keyboard.
I guarantee you— the designers at Apple who chose to hide those scroll bars probably thought more about scrolling more than every one of these commenters combined, and that was before they did formal usability studies.
The days of usability studies are long gone.* It's now change for the sake of change.
Spot the indication that not all settings sections are shown in this screenshot, in all display settings and lighting conditions that your device might be used in.
* Were they ever there? I can't believe this dialog background - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2001/10/macosx-10-1/4/ - was the "winner" in any usability study. This was removed in 2003-11 with the release of 10.3.
a) That scroll bar decision was made a long time ago
b) Problems with specific dialog boxes or dynamically created features is evidence of problems with those dialog boxes or dynamically created features. As someone who's worked both as a developer and a designer, often the engineers win.
c) Assuming that these topics are simple enough for off-the-cuff reckonin' to validate or invalidate them are exactly why the engineers shouldn't win when it comes to interface decisions.
Does anyone apply formal usability studies anymore? (not just do them - do they apply the results). I was trained in formal UX long ago, and many UIs today outright violate common rules we learned back then. High contrast was considered important for low vision users even if it looked ugly then. Now most UIs are lower contrast and while they look nicer, they are less usable.
Of course I learned long ago and so I'm willing to accept that what was best practices back then might be wrong given new research that I'm not aware of. However this seems unlikely.
Formal usability testing is still practiced in enterprise, military, and professional products.
From what I've seen from colleagues in the consumer space they've predominantly switched to A/B testing and statistical clickstream/log analyses, though large companies sometimes still do run lab studies for important decisions and to rationalize the giant one-way mirror they installed.
It depends on how big/important/popular of a product you're talking about, but most software that your average joe uses (operating systems, native communication apps, national websites) likely either conduct significant usability testing or largely inform their designs using great usability testing from people like the mozilla foundation and the nielsen norman group. And no-- neither of those organizations have to be perfect for that to be a perfectly valid approach, and if you follow that guidance, you'll never end up with a 'very low contrast' interface.
I go to the store to buy a hammer. I’m a hammer user and I use the hammer.
Or I go to the store and I buy heroin. I’m a heroin user and I use the heroin.
These UIs we speak of, are they hammers, or are they heroin?
Because I’m currently looking at a high contrast screen using a mixture of Unix tools created from the late 60s to yesterday.
I’m looking at an Excel spreadsheet made by a team of lawyers that is in a UI. The lawyers themselves highlighted and handled the contrast of the document. Beyond the table itself, Excel’s menu bar is easy to read for the basic operating needs of a spreadsheet. I mean come on, the pivot table UI is clearly masterful. (If Excel was a native plaintext tabular format and you could pipe stdin/out to the GUI app? Gimme!)
However, a lot of software is basically useless these days. It’s not designed from the beginning to be productive in any shape or form.
Some stoned dance by a junkie under a highway overpass is definitely some kind of expressive art form. How much more productive is the expressive art forms promoted by TikTok, Twitter or Twitch?
There’s clearly a scale at play. I’m as big fan of Twitch as much as I’m a big fan of the Buffalo Bills. I’ve always appreciated the sociological aspects of sports. To add some context to my definition of productivity, I would say that group sporting events are overall productive from a sociological perspective, be it IPL cricket or Fortnite tournaments.
TikTok is clearly and quite obviously towards the junkie dance scale of things.
From an experiential position there was not much of a difference between my observations of a woman filming herself doing a weird little dance on the sidewalk while completely oblivious to the rest of the world and the junky on the next block doing a weird little dance on the sidewalk while completely oblivious to the rest of the world. This basic object-level assessment of the actions that we and others experience with our physical bodies is core to the very notion of “meaning”. The “meaning” is just the stoned dance.
I know of no junkies famous for only being junkies but there are definitely TikTokers famous for only being TikTokers so don’t confuse this for some strict equivalence.
I’m just trying to establish a kind of framework for discussing the relationship between productive UI and productive software tools.
A)Yes. I've been in the software business in some capacity for the better part of 25 years and software usability right now is miles beyond what it used to be. Thinking otherwise is a function of nostalgia.
B) if you're doing dev work, you're probably not entirely cognizant of how different your software selection and usage patterns are than most people's, even for non-dev things.
C) there's a whole lot of interfaces out there and the great ones work so naturally and intuitively that you don't even notice them. Those are the ones for which many assume the design decisions were so obvious that they didn't even need designers. That's so so not true.Look at the most popular user-facing software: web browsers are all obsessed with usability (mozilla actually does some of the best open usability research out there.) Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, Twitter, et al... Incredibly clear and usable for their target market. Can't get much higher contrast than you do in email applications and other communication apps. There are tools to guage if your text color/background color/ and text size make for readable text according to the WCAG and I have never had a job, either as a designer or as a developer, where AA compliance wasn't a minimum for all functional elements. Most common user-facing interfaces that regularly use light or white text on colored backgrounds, like the iMessage interface or signal, benefit from OS-level accessibility enhancements like increased text size, which are very commonly used among the people who need them. My non-tech-savvy elderly relatives all knew about them through the setup process on their devices when they first bought them, and never looked back. Looking through every communication or other popular user-facing software package on my Galaxy U22 using a default theme shows nothing even remotely low-contrast.
> the designers at Apple who chose to hide those scroll bars probably thought more about scrolling more than every one of these commenters combined, and that was before they did formal usability studies.
This blind appeal to authority shouldn't convince anyone.
That point is how you justify all your conjecture. Rethink what you wrote because all you're really doing is relying on anecdotes. I can literally say the opposite (I always use the scrollbar for scrolling and everybody I know does too) and we'd have made zero progress.
You haven't actually made an argument worth arguing about. It's devoid of value and it's not a productive addition to the conversation.
And don't bother wasting any more of my time. I don't care. You clearly have nothing to say.
Because designers and devs don't want to have to do multiple designs. Everyone's aiming for one design that works for everything. The problem is that such a thing is impossible.
Vollying back your flipness-- This sort of reductive assumption about software design is why companies that need people who aren't developers to actually use their products hire interface designers.
Most employers I've had are all about getting engineers to be everything. Designers, infrastructure, QA, UI/UX, and even product/project managers.. everything.
Sounds like you need new employers. The only people who want that are shortsighted managers who don't care that they know nothing about users' needs, and that's certainly not a universal disposition in the software business.
This has been true of every employer I have ever had. It's true outside of "tech" as well but nearly all of my experience has been as a software engineer.
People are generationally creatures of habit. Newer generations are entering the workforce for whom their first personal computing device was a touchscreen smartphone. With that context in mind, it's not surprising that a "native" responsive experience to them will be mobile centric rather than desktop centric. The market then evolves to cater to the needs of its largest cohorts.
Yes. To engineers, the interface is something you use to interact with software. To users, the interface is the software. When they buy (with money or creepy analytics for marketers) software, they're buying an interface. As anybody in business knows, you're not in the business you think you're in, you're in the business your customers think you're in, and if they expect software to behave in a way it can't, their competitor is a half-inch down the app store results/google listing/etc.
Controls? Regardless of whether or not you like the changes, device usage changes the way people use other devices. What you deem "correct" is not the objective universal truth you think it is. Not knowing that is why almost all FOSS interfaces are an absolute dumpster fire.
I think you're missing the point. Usability is not prescriptive. You implement what your users have the easiest time using. Touch interfaces change how people interact with interfaces. If you care about usability, you work with people on that and not against them.
> Yes, MacOS Has them set as "Only Show When Scrolling" by default, which is probably the most ridiculous setting.
I have used MacOS every day for 10 years and i've never, except in exceptional circumstances, used the scrollbar to scroll. I don't see anybody in my circle using it. They all have the "Only Show When Scrolling" setting on.
I don't think this is ridiculous and I would enable the setting if turned off by default.
I also spend 99% percent of my time in full-screen mode in safari, vscode or terminal. So the top bar is also hidden by default. I think this is much more focused.
The scroll bar, for me at. least, is also used to gauge how far along in a document I am. So its use is more than just for moving. If I have to find out here I am in a document by scrolling that just means extra effort on my part.
Yes, we should absolutely make everything less accessible in the name of aesthetics. That's made computer interfaces so much better in the past 20 years.
You're right about the scrollbar contrast, even though I've customized the hell out of the scrollbar in my collAnon pwa I made the mistake to make it less contrasting for design appeal reasons alone. I guess that's gonna go in the next release
> Also, we wouldn't need "dark mode" or the such …
People with cataracts may benefit from dark mode. People with glaucoma or higher order aberrations (e.g. me) may benefit from light mode. Web sites should use `prefers-color-scheme`; native GUI programs should use the native equivalents (or default colours); command-line programs should not assume a particular background.
The main problem is that there is no dark or light mode. It is light gray on white or dark gray on black (and the white and black are also gray). It is just sick.
I often wish we had more analog control in the digital world. I wish there were turn knobs instead up/down buttons with 10 steps (where it is easy to accidentally leave a menu... When trying to get back to where you were, you are suddenly adjusting something else entirely). Manual control with digital devices has become too digital and too cumbersome.
It used to be easy to adjust contrast and brightness on a display, volume on an amplifiee, an analog TV, a termostat, a car radio, etc.
I realize that we are not really on course (yet?) for reintroducing a lot of analog controls, but in the end, our world is analog. Input is analog via speech, muscle motion, etc. Output is analog, via light and other vibrations that reach our senses. Why isn't control more analog? It's probably a cost thing.
I would totally buy a display or a laptop with analog controls. I don't even care if the turn dial actually has 16M steps, so long as the response is pretty much immediate and feels like a real potentiometer. It should feel like direct manipulation and like you're in control, instead of these digital roundabout abominations.
As to the subject, I imagine having some knobs that I can adjust under different circumstances to quickly vary intensity or cycle through alternatives in order to make things more readable or audible.
90% Of what we do is in the browser today. Browsers could have an "accessibility" API such that turn knobs (bluetooth? whatever) could be used for control. Like scroll wheels but on steroids?
And when you finally have a along controls everything is overloaded.
Dish forced a new remote on us last time a device broke and they replaced it. It has far fewer buttons. I’m sure it helps getting familiar with it on a super basic level. But the old one wasn’t that complicated anyhow.
But here’s the kicker: there’s no fast forward or rewind buttons. There no stop button. No record button. All of these (and more) have been turned into menu items and/or secret chords on the remote.
Oh. And it has a mic on it too. Hard pass.
Tv remote is just the easy example. I see it all over the place. Sleek no longer is pretty to my eyes. If I see something that I have to interact with these days and it looks sleek, I see frustration.
I just got an Apple TV and got crazy with the unintentional swipes and touches. Then I discovered you can turn that off, to click-only. It‘s much better now, maybe that helps you too.
Yes direkt a 1:1 mapping of an analog (button/knob) would work better than what you describe.
Multifunction buttons… that never existed in the analog world? Or is that what is called “mode”? Send vs receive etc. Does anyone have a concrete example?
I’m not a remote control designer but I would think it would be fun to give it a try! Maybe I will :)
Most plugins used in music software do take that approach. Where the plugin interfaces are modelled to look 'like hardware' in most cases, with nobs, sliders, all the things you'd expect on a hardware compressor / synth etc.
Even better, I connect a midi keyboard so I can use its knobs and faders to manipulate the plugins. Much better feel, and for something like eq, it's nice to be able to manipulate multiple things at once
“…it's nice to be able to manipulate multiple things at once.”
Particularly if one thing affects another in a ripple-effect or chain reaction. It is great to be able to adjust at least two values at once. Keeps you from going back-and-forth adjusting in ever smaller increments to get to the settings you want.
Not this in this use case, in fact quite the opposite.
generally most want to have a knob they can adjust and not worry about the underlying value. It's in line with the philosophy of tweaking settings and not using your eyes to judge if its in the right position.
I hope you see this, just noticed your reply! Thanks for the encouragement, music production/DJing is something I really want to get into, so encouragement is extremely welcome. :) My problem when I tried using it was that the knobs were really difficult to adjust with my mouse, like it didn’t feel responsive. Am I doing something wrong?
This is actually one of the things I love about my Mini Cooper; they have cool physical toggle switches that feel like you're in a cockpit instead of the all-digital interfaces that feel like a coffee bar.
It seems we are so amazingly primitive that we still think touch screens are a pretty neat idea for anything.
But I’m sure analog controls will come back at some time in the future: First in really expensive cars, as expression of luxury. Only cheap cars will still have the cheap touch screens. Slowly, the old new way of interaction will trickle down to anything else.
Like it went for the digital watch, ubiquitous for a short time, then a return to analog. Although those Casios seem to have a retro-retro comeback lately. I think even real keyboards might be a cool feature of future high-end smartphones.
I mean, for most things a touchscreen is pretty much the ultimate human interface — we are fundamentally hand-based creatures and the ability to re-render the same glasspane into a controller for anything is still magic.
There are of course things where more specialized inputs are required, but for the rest, touchscreens are here to stay*
* One improvement I would like to see it about their surface — we can no longer blind type on phones, because we can’t feel the borders of the buttons - but I think we have the tech to dynamically make the screen’s surface rougher/smoother. Another idea is to bring back 3D touch (and potentially improve on that - maybe it could even take some 3D vector as input?)
My current favorite is the vanishing scrollbars that appear for two seconds after you start scrolling. Chrome is awful with this. When I'm trying to review a couple-thousand-line PR, Chrome stutters and freezes, and the scrollbar won't show up for several seconds and then it immediately vanishes as the UI catches up with the input. Or sometimes I click on the ephemeral scrollbar but my click doesn't register until after it's vanished again. It's infuriating.
The tiny scrollbars with laughable contrast are in no way accessible to anyone...It's blatant how UI designers don't give a damn about the users’ needs
I’ve seen this trend going on for over a decade now, like a slow parabolic arc. Somehow the aim of developers and designers turned around 180 degrees and became less and less about pleasing the users and more and more about impressing other people in your field. (Both programming and design.)
It's also sad that 10-15 years ago near-everything I used was just themed based on system/windows manager and it was possible to make those changes system-wide (with some mess if you used QT apps with gnome and vice versa, but still), and now we're locked in hellhole of HTML and CSS "native" apps
Ello has been down for months now with issues at TalentHouse AG (apparently in or near bankruptcy), and archives of that site at both the Wayback Machine and the (usually successful) Archive Today ... show no actual content best I can tell.
> And while the bars were shrinking, another feature silently disappeared: buttons to click and hold down to scroll left/right in increments.
This feature still exists, with a larger clickable surface, but with lower affordance – the entire area above and below the scroll bar is a "button" for exactly that purpose.
However, this area moves the screen a page per click, instead of a line per click. It actually replaces another, now long forgotten scrollbar button found on the Xerox Star and in some Lisa applications.
Not really the same feature. Typically, scroll-bar clicks will scroll by pages, while the little buttons will scroll by lines.
Also: using the little buttons, you can position the cursor once and then click repeatedly for repeated movements, taking you ultimately to the very top or bottom of the page. But when clicking the scroll bar, page movement generally stops as soon as the slider moves underneath your cursor.
Once again I have to give firefox credit for giving users the tools in about:config to disable this. It's cute fluff at best and annoying/abusive at worst.
The browser's UI should more or less be fully off the table when it comes to what a website can change, and that includes scrollbars.
Let's include smooth scrolling in that list, too (whether scrolling with the mouse wheel or moving between words I Ctrl-F for on the page). Thankfully you can override this with uBlock Origin.
And on the flip side, Chrome - just had the biggest laugh when I got to this point:
"Imagine being able to configure anything useful in chrome ever."
Overall, a very well written article - kudos to the author.
(I've made the switch to FF again myself after Edge just got too annoying with their constant nagging about Bing search and other features. And the prompt to restore tabs. Just STFU and stop it already.)
Could you explain this point to me? I just checked and out of those two, it was _Firefox_ that has tiny, barely visible, vanishing scroll bars and _Chrome_ that has thick, well-visible, persistent ones. (And no, I didn't configure that on either)
The only thing that IMHO needs improvement in Chrome scroll bars is that the knob is light grey on lighter grey.
One useful thing you can enable in Chrome is tab bar scrolling. Without this setting the tab bar is broken by default, if you open too many tabs on it the bar will simply not show some of them because there's no room left, while all remaining ones are just a few pixels wide.
Does the suggestion in the article not work? There are few options in about:config for scrollbars so I'd look at the others too. If that doesn't work I'd bet https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ has a solution.
That is confusing... I'm not sure what the unit of measurement there even is. Something like pixels would be nice, but that can't be it with a default of 1!
about:config is invaluable, but better documentation on the options would really be nice.
Also, kudos for the extended family of extension writers. The article author ends on praise for minimap sidebars as an upgrade over conventional scrollbars, and what do you know, there's something for that:
> The browser's UI should more or less be fully off the table when it comes to what a website can change, and that includes scrollbars.
I have a very strong recollection of adamantly defending IE6's ability to style scroll bars on forums in the early 2000s, whereas the Mozilla crowd at the time called it an abomination.
As an older man with both the power of hindsight and the weakness of failing sight, I can admit I was wrong. It's far too apt to abuse
If it were restricted just to style abominations, that would be one thing. It's the sites — and the libraries — that hijack the native behaviour, changing the speed / acceleration / easing of the scroll that are the really bad offenders.
It's not just your eyes, we were using very different screen resolutions back then and UI was lot clunkier looking too. Having the option is nice, but being able to disable that is critical
Not to mention it is the only program I ever used which lets you directly rearrange the UI. Three clicks and you can reorder or remove buttons, margins etc, we need something like that in every program including a color chooser for every element.
The problem with about:config options is that Mozilla sometimes decides to remove them (based on telemetry numbers perhaps). The usual path for an unpopular option seems to be GUI -> about:config -> The Void.
about:config options are workarounds, not solutions. This is for two reasons: first, they can change or vanish at any time, as you point out. Second, they're not very discoverable. You generally have to be told about them to know they're there.
Can someone tell me how to make the Mac os native scroll bar wider? It's infuriating trying to grab the little skinny bar. I'm asking here because it seems related and hopefully someone reading this works at Apple or has a solution.
You know what's an accessibility problem for a lot of people over 40? White text on a dark background. I don't think I'll ever get tired of hearing people advocate for making web pages readable for people my age.
Yeah, opening up the inspector and updating the author's CSS made it readable for me, but made the shell script unreadable.
Biology. I’m in my 50s and get an eye exam every year. According to my optometrist my prescription has been stable for about a decade, but I can definitely tell the difference. My eyes do not focus very fast anymore, my eyes do not adjust going from a light space to a dark space or vice versa very fast anymore. I now have to hold books and my phone away from me to bring them into focus. Same with white text on dark backgrounds. I used to use dark themes for everything, but it just doesn’t work for me anymore. I’ve mentioned these to my optometrist and they say that it happens to everyone with age.
What about yellow text on brown background like [0] ?
I use this combo in my editor to avoid changing to light theme on bright days and dark theme at night.
Not that old, but I have astigmatism. And every spot of light has a glow around it. Black on white is better because the characters only got thinner. But light characters on dark background is like having tiny projectors and the shapes are not recognizable at a glance.
The web says that astigmatism leads to glowing, blurry text when it is shown white on dark. The iris narrowing in bright conditions seems to reduce the effect, while the widened iris in low light seems to worsen it.
Man, everyone hates bright lights on tall SUVs except their owners, who are blissfully unconcerned with the trail of migraines they leave in their wake.
I'm under 40 and this puts immense strain on my eyes. After reading a few paragraphs if I look over to the wall I will see persistent shadow-text in my vision for 30 seconds or more. Very uncomfortable.
It's to the point that if highlighting all the text doesn't mitigate the dark/white contrast, I'll just avoid reading that page entirely.
I’m using Dark Reader extension on sites like that. It may sound absurd to do that, but it actually re-colors bs colorschemes and has quick settings for relative brightness, contrast and saturation, so you can tune it to acceptable levels. Without it my eyes bleed on dark toxic sites as much as yours. It also works good with syntax highlighting, because it uses “dynamic coloring” which guesses best color maps for every page.
Unfortunately a lot of accessibility concerns are of competing interest against each other and people making webpages don't have infinite time to allocate to ensuring they have options for everyone. You might consider just disabling css altogether.
Or get in the habit of using the browsers reader mode. You can style it to your liking and it generally does a great job, at least for me in Firefox where I use it frequently
Use for browsers, you might try to play around with the "Dark Reader" addon. While normally used for setting a universal dark mode, you can also a white mode, either globally or per site.
My fellow readers, do not succumb to the heresies expressed in that blog post! Clearly, the future is in eye tracking data streamed to the cloud, where an AI will predict the scroll target, to be revealed by the application. Most cheerfully, this will not only be a subscription based service, but will also solve the problems with ad attention. ;-)
Windows 11 has these awful scroll bars - at least on dark mode, that are a hair thin and the bar color is the same almost as the background scroll area and I for the life of me, at under 40 years old, cannot ever figure out /where/ the damn button portion is. Windows 11 also likes to auto-hide scroll bars, and minimize them otherwise which is super weird to me since its supposedly a touch friendly OS (Designed for Surface and Phones as Windows 10X supposedly)
Mobile devices have no visible scrollbar unless you are actively scrolling. This is the look they were going for when they say “touch first”. Users are not expected to use the scroll wheel to jump, or click, or do any maneuver more precise than selecting a block of text.
> designers do not sit with non technical users to conduct usability testing
It wouldn’t matter if they did. I’ve been a web developer for nearly 25 years and have worked with many many designers. You know they care about? Pixel perfect layouts that match their “vision”. UX isn’t even a fleeting thought.
While not all designers are like this, many are. I've seen designers come out of actual UX studies involving real users, saying "Well, while this is one data point, we think those users are wrong." There's no getting through.
The author sees half the problem and offers the worse half of a solution.
A scrollbar is not only a control, it's also an indicator. It shows where your viewport is relative to the bigger view, e.g. a long list. Hiding scrollbars, like some [redacted] GUIs like macOS do, is just acutely impolite, much like making buttons indistinguishable from text, or putting light grey text on a light grey background.
A solution exists, and is nearly universally implemented: scroll wheels on a mouse, and scroll gestures on a trackpad. Very, very rarely do I find a view which can be scrolled by scrollbars, but cannot be scrolled by the standard trackpad gesture, or by a mouse wheel. (BTW my mouse also allows horizontal scrolling using the wheel; so do trackpoint controls, too.)
Such scrolling does not require the pointer to even be at a scrollbar; the pointer just need to hover over the desired view / control / widget. This is really easy to achieve with imprecise input devices, unsteady hands, and poor vision.
But with this natural, easy way of scrolling one starts to really miss scrollbars in their indicator role.
(Regarding minimaps: sometimes they are helpful, sometimes not so much. I in particular find them unhelpful and bulky for text editing, but of course I'm all in favor of having them as an option for those who enjoy them.)
What's stopping those input methods from having a special scroll gesture that is optimal for their input medium? But sure, have an accessibility override for giant scrollbars.
I thinks that of all things, eye trackers and voice controllers have the easiest time sending whatever scrolling commands, without a need to fiddle with scrollbars.
??? macOS (and iOS) is designed this way because of the gesture you want! You don't need the scrollbar because you have the gesture. If you want to see where you are in the page you just scroll a teeny bit. It works great, I haven't seen a scrollbar in years and its never a problem. Sure, some accessibility options are nice for some people.
A gesture is an action. It's good, and it works as intended.
A scrollbar is (also) an indication, glanceable, not requiring any action.
If someone among your friends and family has an iOS device, remember how many times you had to show them that certain screens can be scrolled down? Oh, not just down, but also to the right? There used to be a few perfectly aligned views that had no indication whatsoever that there's more to them is you scroll.
Narrow but visible scrollbars would solve this easily.
Don’t underestimate how much pulling the rug out from under people via constant UI churn negatively affects their lives and interactions with computers. Leads to lower confidence, helplessness, etc.
On macOS at least, it's not one change, it's at least four:
- scrollbars overlaying the content, rather than having dedicated space
- scrollbars that auto-hide when not in use
- scrollbars that are initially narrow, then widen when you mouse-over
- removal of the scroll buttons
That's not including the visual design changes, which are arguably important too (e.g. the scroll "thumb" now has a very flat design rather than textured so it looks draggable).
Edit to add: oh yeah, one more I forgot: in classic Mac OS the scroll thumb had a fixed size, now it reflects the size of the viewport. That one is a useful and positive change, though. Not sure where that innovation came from but it wasn't the Mac.
I don’t have citations handy but I don’t think they changed it all at once. There might have a been a single major switch on macOS but I think all this stuff was developed incrementally on iOS.
Many changes are still many changes even if they happened at the same time. You can't just lump together all the changes to the design to claim its only one.
On the contrary, I've professionally seen even technical users get confused by their OS hiding the scroll bar, and them not realizing what they're looking for requires scrolling.
People literally did not know that you could scroll the share menu on some versions of android until they specifically added a "fold" to hide half an icon just so people realised that there was more options available. Hiding a scrollbar is so unnecessary. It's one of the best UI/UX elements ever created and people got it right so long ago
Scroll wheels and gestures are paging mechanisms, a scrollbar does that as well but it’s also a “take me to the middle of the document” control.
Assuming a properly responsive document (not something you can take for granted today, especially on the web), you can readily use the scrollbar to navigate large ranges within a document, especially large ones.
Countless times, on large, old PDFs with no links and that use that kind of “B-29” section page numbering have I essentially used the scrollbar to binary search the document for some buried page.
Of course the modern web has practically destroyed the applicability of the scrollbar as indicator because of the rampant use of lazy loading and endless scrolling. Many times on the Mac I’ve tried to use Cmd-down arrow to jump to the end of the document, hoping that there IS an end, and that it will load all of embeds that wreak havoc with the formatting.
But, alas, I find I’m on some endless train, with no hope of knowing how far I’ve gone or how far I have to go.
All that said, I happen to have a weighted mouse wheel on a bearing that is specifically designed for high velocity doom scrolling, partly because the scrollbar is effectively useless.
> Scroll wheels and gestures are paging mechanisms, a scrollbar does that as well but it’s also a “take me to the middle of the document” control.
IME, only on Linux am I able to click on an arbitrary location beneath or atop the scrollbar and be taken there immediately. On Windows, it seems that clicking below the scrollbar is equivalent to scrolling down once. If you want to go all the way to the bottom of the document or webpage, you have to drag the scrollbar all the way down manually. I actually find it kind of annoying. I don't know about MacOS, as I haven't used it since I was a kid.
>On Windows, it seems that clicking below the scrollbar is equivalent to scrolling down once. If you want to go all the way to the bottom of the document or webpage, you have to drag the scrollbar all the way down manually. I actually find it kind of annoying.
On windows at least the middle button could be used to anchor a virtual scroll wheel or whatever that feature was a called. I’ve used it quite often on large content with small windows.
There are extensions for chrome and firefox[0] that can allow for continued scrolling by scroll wheel to exponentionally (as in, actually exponential) speed up. With this, I pretty much never use the scrollbar UI element as an input.
> A scrollbar is not only a control, it's also an indicator.
Thank you! finally someone understands what a scrollbar is for. It primary job is to show the user that the document is bigger than the window, and secondly, to show which part of the document is visible. Letting the user scroll around is not the primary function!
I was genuinely surprised when Apple started hiding scrollbars by default in macOS. Their UI designers clearly don't have a clue what the basic UI controls really do.
Not just that "the document is bigger than the window" but the best scrollbars tell you, approximately, how tall the document is in relation to the window height! Proper scrollbars are, possibly, one of the best UI elements ever invented.
Input devices for scrolling are not universally available.
Wacom/pen users don't have a scroll wheel.
Many trackballs don't have a scroll wheel. Some have a scroll ring around the ball though.
I got RSI in my scrolling finger, so I removed the scroll wheel from my mice. And there have been times that I have overstretched my mouse-arm and had to use a trackball with my other hand for a few weeks.
They're getting less usable as well. One of the mice I use daily has had a broken scroll wheel for a few months now and I've been too lazy and/or busy to replace it, and it's shocking how broken scroll bars are if you try to actually use them. Infinitely scrolling content and content that resizes itself when it loads in very frequently combine in ways that make the scroll bar jump around in ways that make navigation very difficult.
> On the one paw, recompile my GUI theme? - but hey I’m a gentoo user I do that every friday anyway, I could just drop a patch in I guess… RECOMPILE MY GUI THEME??
Gentoo is a great learning exercise, but Arch has me focusing on doing things.
Add the newest Steam UI to the list of shame, not only for having skinny scrollbars, but also for having the 5px wide hitbox end several pixels short so that slamming the mouse against the right edge of the maximized window misses the scrollbar.
This is why, in the good old days, UI folks got all worked up when programmers reimplemented basic controls, because they always did it half-assed and could not connect into all the other parts of the OS that users can configure, or have connections to accessibility software, etc...
I remember some horrors in my lifetime: WinAMP skins, browser skins, people recklessly ignoring all of the wisdom collected on asktog.com...
But the horrors became so frequent that we all became numb, and now even Windows ships with more UI disarray than could have been imagined in the early 2000s...
The hardest part of becoming a greybeard is realizing what could have been, that we have abandoned.
Actually, I don't really mind the scrollbar behavior in Steam, as the UNCHANGEABLE font size is so friggin tiny I can't see anything anyway (no, the "scale text" option does not fix this for me).
I hate to be That Guy, but I wonder if there is any USA case history precedent where the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) was used to successfully 'motivate' companies to fix inaccessible software? It seems like an obvious fit. Clearly, The Market is failing to adequately solve the problem.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 578 ms ] thread"Don't rely on gsettings. They are private and users are not supposed to be setting them theirselves. Don't complain when they suddenly stop working." -- every gtk dev I've ever talked to.
That said, I've applied those firefox about:config fixes and it's much better. Whew.
“Good” (as in accessible) design is pretty boring and decluttered compared to most modern expectations of web apps. I read Adam Silver’s book on forms and came away realizing that we’re doing it entirely wrong from an a11y standpoint but that’s just not a priority.
(I kid, I think VMS has a better design than Linux)
Please!
I was a stage II CS student learning assembly programming on a VAX simulator. Wrote a VAX simulator, in VAX assembly then ran VAX assembly programmes on it.
Was a lot of fun. The dreams were weird tho
(Now just wait for that to pop into your head at the next work meeting)
I guess ubiquitous autocomplete has made that convention redundant.
edit: I will say this is a bad example because looking it up there is 40+ words that fit this description so maybe I am biased by experience. i18n works better but I think my point is no longer correct.
Greek, Latin and <tech lingo>.
The Greek/Latin/<jargon> structure should be standard or taught in schools in some capacity.
Basic programming concepts are popular, useful and should probably be taught as a sub category of English... given that programming is supposed to be a language, and pull its roots (somewhat) from English or "natural language".
Society would produce higher quality code if the basic concepts were considered as a literacy requirement for children.
It's certainly not widespread. Or at least, this is the first time I've ever seen it.
Spitballing...Keep in mind, without context, "accessibility" is also jargon in the sense not everyone is going to know what and how that means. My mum certainly wouldn't understand a11y, I agree. But she also would understand "accessibility" or even "website accessibility."
Full disclosure: I'm 5x more picky than the next person when it comes to comms. Absolutely, words matter. But one of the foundations to comms is context. The context in this case is HN.
Let's move on now.
Then in his next web project, he just might use https://github.com/pa11y/pa11y and make the world a better place!
It’s why we need laws to mandate accessibility.
I have no stake in a11y, but I hear the same appeal re software correctness and statistical significance and many other individually reasonable asks, that nevertheless add up to a gridlock of regulations.
On desktops, I'll remove that horizontal bar via uBlock Origin's element remover or a Stylus CSS rule.
I doubt you meant it, but your post reads like you're advocating less-abled people purchase (often expensive) eye-trackers instead of making scrollbars generally more usable for everyone.
Everybody who tries to actually use the scroll bar as a handle (rather than a non-interactive position indicator for use with the other scrolling methods) would have a problem, because they're not really meant to be used that way and most people don't use them that way (which is why they keep shrinking).
Unfortunately the article doesn't mention how people who don't use an eye tracker, can't use a scroll wheel/touchscreen-dragging (or adapted replacement for either!), but could use a "normal-sized" scrollbar, are actually interacting with their devices. I imagine that overlapping group to be rather small.
...how do you think people scrolled documents in Word before mice had scroll-wheels?
With the page up and page down keys, mostly, though you could drag the scrollbar.
Not sure about Word, but I believe many apps had a keyboard + mouse combination that enabled scrolling with any mouse movement without interacting with the scollbar, as well.
There is NO way that most people used page up down rather than drag the scrollbar in the late 90s.
Same for browsers, FF may care about accessibility, but they won’t lose the browser wars (bit of a moot point by now, but eh) because most people like Chrome’s tiny scrollbars.
It’s not the only factor, but it is a factor.
You can make the same exercise, trying to run for ex Windows in a virtual machine with a 640x480 screen.
And for trackpad and scrollwheel users it's the same, I absolutely adore chiral scrolling but you still need to use the scrollbars sometimes (or often).
All these things only replace the arrows of scrollbars (enhancing them with some speed control), but the arrows are just a tiny and stupid aspect of scrollbars (I don't remember ever seeing someone using them).
I think we need to stop shifting blame to "the bosses." The bosses are (generally) not getting involved with the minutia of how scroll bars work or what color they are, or how accessible they are. This problem falls squarely in the lap of 1. the UX designers who think scrollbars are icky and get in the way of their pure vision of the app and 2. the developers who don't push back on the madness.
Yes, I've had "bosses" who annoyingly micromanaged the UX of our product, and yes, it's irritating when that happens. But I highly doubt it's the general case. Designers have run amok in the never-ending quest to fill out their portfolios, and accessible things like thick scrollbars, large fonts, contrasting bold colors, and an information architecture that lends itself to screen readers get in the way of their sterile, minimalist aesthetic.
But it's not just disabled people. I'm not disabled, but curse the scrollbar and window frame situation every day. Their minimization makes actually using the UI a greater pain in the ass.
Absolutely infuriating. I blame iOS and macOS for encouraging this insanity and starting the fashion trend, and tangentially whoever pushed along this whole "flat" UI trend that makes it so hard to guess at what is what.
UI is communication, and UI designers have decided that mumbling is cool.
For desktop OSes where the smallest screen being used is much larger on the other hand there's not much of a good reason to hide them.
It looks nicer + you can just use the scroll wheel. A lot of the UI affordances lost over the last decade or two are unfortunate, but complaints about scroll bars seem to be purely baby duck syndrome.
Obviously not, but you also shouldn't expect the whole world to be designed around your needs. If you have difficulty using the expected input method, you should use alternatives with the same functionality, not expect others to redesign their apps in your preferred way.
Design for the best accessibility first and foremost, then try and make things look "prettier".
Disabilities can affect anyone at any time and shouldn't be an afterthought.
Most of the terrible designs and accessibility problems stem from software going out its way to write custom controls or force controls to look and behave in a non-default way. It's not an afterthought--people are deliberately adding code to make their software worse.
You design a clear, visible, distinctive scroll bar and buttons? Boom, you've catered to everyone with bad vision (for any reason: from blindness to eye surgery), reduced motor skills (for any reason: from arthritis to old age to hand injuries), non-technical users (so they don't have to hunt around the interface hoping to discover hidden features).
And this goes for everything in software.
Disability is a spectrum, and you yourself will be disabled in one way or another, multiple times, during the course of your life. Be it from old age, surgeries, injuries, strain from sport or mundane tasks like holding a baby.
Yes
It is thr toolkit builder's job.
As an application developer you should not have to
I don't think anyone is expecting that. What's reasonable to expect is that these things are configurable so people can have a UI that works for them.
I was searching for a way to make Mac scrollbars wider literally yesterday. It's 100% a real problem.
And no, trying to scroll every control just to find this out is not my ideal of usability and comfort.
We know the exact temperature and humidity outside, we have logs of the exact times that our smart lights turned on and off. Our watches tell us our heart rate throughout the day and even its variability. Our phones monitor how much we use them, and in which apps, and report back weekly. When I had outlook in the office, it would summarize how much time I spent in meetings, seemingly to increase my stress level one more notch.
The lack of a scroll bar returns mystery, but even more, it brings us back to a simpler time when we weren't overloaded by information such as "how much is left of this text?" or "is there a button hidden somewhere on this page that allows me to complete my task, or is the app just broken?"
These are the sorts of small joys that we miss in the Information Age.
It is an enabler of information overload, not a solution or respite.
that information can be conveyed with a 1-pixel wide bar with proper color contrast, not requiring a waste of the whole scrollbar's width
Maybe this bright idea that information and control are separate things can inspire the future gen of UI designers to actually make this a reality
On my desktops I've got more screen width than any of my open windows know what to do with, and they still want to skimp on scroll bar width. I can understand with mobile, but mobile design decisions are crowding out desktop usability. It's lazy and cheap but the market is monopolised enough that the approaching horizon can only look "no worse" at best.
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". My work laptop does not have a "scroll wheel". There is a posibility to scroll using the touch pad but it is undocumented and hit or miss.
At risk of hijacking this complaint thread onto an even more inflammatory set of rails:
They may just be copying modern cinema. I can't watch many movies or TV shows these days without subtitles - even when the kids are quiet / sleeping / at school.
These scrollbars are absolutely pathetic, with no room for customisation. (good luck theming a locked-down application) It's blatant how UI designers don't give a damn about the users' needs, not even in FOSSland. I am not entirely sure why this is the case but it's a sad regression from the days when we had good-looking, functional, accessible and snappy software. Not locked-down, unthemable electron bullshit.
Also, we wouldn't need "dark mode" or the such if the UIs had any contrast and were legible.
We've hit peak usability about twenty years ago, in the Windows 2000 era. The screenshot in the article is actually from about that era, it's one of the early 10.x (10.3 I believe) OS X releases.
System 7 or 8, methinks. Clean, cool and collected.
Contrast is a factor yes, but the other thing that's happened with the flat UI epidemic is banishment of mid grays and light grays in favor of stark white and off-whites, making "light mode" much more bright looking than it had been previously. It's no wonder people were clamoring for dark mode after blinding flat UI had taken over.
That aside, high dpi displays are still a rare sight on desktops, there’s not many of them and the aspect ratios and ancillary features are extremely limited.
No, they aren't. ALL displays these days are high-dpi, when you compare to the 640x480 and 800x600 screens that were normal in the late 1990s. But the window managers back then were FAR better (in functionality and appearance) than what most of us use today.
Yeah they are.
> ALL displays these days are high-dpi, when you compare to the 640x480 and 800x600 screens that were normal in the late 1990s.
Leaving side your wilful misunderstanding of fairly standard concepts, no they are not: the monitors you are talking about were generally tiny, and the minor increase in median pixel density was largely counteracted by the blocky precision of LCD pixels.
For example, Macintosh was 72 ppi for a long time ( it is 109 ppi now).
My first LCD screen was 15“. And that was for a desktop, not a laptop. 17“ or 19“ were for rich guys or graphics designers ;)
What is certainly the case though is that GUIs nowadays are much more wasteful with space.
Personally, I think it's just that monochrome icons are fashionable. I can't imagine that the GIMP developers for example chose to make GIMP's icons monochrome because that works better on e-ink screens.
For text and graphics, you'd generally want to use a higher-quality, lower-refresh-rate mode. Which is to say that there's quite a bit of established UI/UX knowledge that wants a refresh. I've distilled a set of basic principles: persistence is free, pixels are cheap, paints are slow, colour is (mostly) nonexistent, and the more ambient light the better. Paginated-navigation (whole screen changes in one go), line-art, and dithered or halftoned images work relatively well, raster images not quite so much, though can be acceptable.
<https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/638a8d10e041013afba844...>
For a demonstration of a wide range of displays (the best ones are featured last) as of 2021, see: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=KdrMjnYAap4>
... I'm having difficulty finding e-ink / electronic paper market research, though one hit suggests an 8.5% CAGR: <https://dataintelo.com/report/global-e-ink-sales-market/>.
Using HN as a rough proxy, I see fairly substantial growth. Note that HN submissions overall have been fairly constant since 2012, per dang.
"e-ink"
"Electronic Paper" has minimal hits, though by years above: 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 2, 1, 0, 1, 6, 1, 1, 0, 0, 8, 1."Digital paper" has an even smaller smattering of hits.
... though Apple has had monochrome devices (the original Mac, the handheld Newton) ...
... and often makes preparations years on advance for long-term strategic moves.
I'm putting very low emphasis on that last, as e-ink really doesn't seem to fit particularly well with the Apple ethos, except, perhaps, for watches.
But if Apple were planning, or even contemplating, an e-ink device, ordering a flat white UI/UX might be precisely the first step in getting there.
Many of these issues already exist, e.g., for documents which are likely to be printed on monochrome devices. Colour is useful where available, but it is not universally available.
(And that's before addressing issues such as colourblindness or other disability / accessibility considerations.)
My original comment was not at all specific to Apple (you'd introduced them to the discussion), other vendors, or any specific OS or application. Simply that monochrome and e-ink are increasingly concerns.
But since you raised the topic of Apple, and since, contrary to your initial statement that, broadly speaking, monochrome was "a display technology they never used", I'm both correcting the record, and noting that should there be a monochrome or e-ink prospect on Apple's roadmap, and further noting that Apple rather famously does not announce such roadmaps in advance, that flat/white would in fact fit with e-ink remarkably well.
What that has to say about whether or not Apple is contemplating any such move I am, of course, entirely ignorant.
Any explanation of the anti color trend must explain Apple's participation. Especially because Microsoft and GNOME appeared to imitate Apple.
I did not say monochrome was a display technology Apple never used. You named e ink. And monochrome is not a display technology.
Other trends included more transparency in content areas, links almost unidentifiable without color, and other reliance on small shade differences. And Apple made all app icons the same shape. All worse for e ink.
OK, that does it. You're a Hong Kong viking, not a Seattle baker.
No, light grey -- or some other light pastel colour -- and white.
I seem to recall that something like QtCurve offered buttons to do that within the scrollbar.
If only everyone did that, many time wasted in scrolling would be saved and "go to the top" buttons in websites wouldn't exist
Often using software without white mode the thing is so bright, that the walls near me get lighted up as if I was using a flashlight or something.
Thus I have to make the screen less bright, but often this also make the screen colors and contrast get all screwy and I still can't see anything.
I miss Win 9x era grey interface... it wasn't beautiful but I could actually see stuff.
Not everyone is.
That's pretty much the issue here in a nutshell.
When I play games I get the vivid colors and contrast so all good.
It's just that monitors nowadays don't even default to SRGB profile.
Windows in hdr mode with hdr monitor(vesa certified) and windows in sdr with a monitor set to srgb mode should have an almost identical visual.
(I tried searching a few times, no luck..)
The default UI here on HN features your username in #828282 on a background of #F6F6EF [1], a contrast ratio of 3.54:1. The up and downvote arrows are #999999 on #F6F6EF [2], a ratio of 2.62:1. On a high-brightness screen, these less-intense contrasts look great. And this is far from the only place with 'nice calm greys' that are intentionally used by designers to reduce eye strain.
I run Visual Studio in dark mode, and Windows Explorer in dark mode, and Notepad++ in dark mode, and Omron Sysmac Studio in dark mode, and Autocad Electrical in dark mode, and Alibre CAD at the default (light gray) theme, and they look great. I'm in a nice, bright office, with (4) daylight 4' T8 LED bulbs directly overhead, and a whiteboard as the backdrop to my monitors, so it's not like I'm a recluse in a dark cave. The monitor brightness is not wrong.
At least, it's not wrong until I win-right or alt-tab over an Excel document or an old version of Studio 5000, where the color profile is stuck at black text on a white background. Then I'm instantly blinded. I can't set half the monitor (just the part over the Excel spreadsheet) to the right contrast and brightness to make Excel acceptable, because then I can't see better-designed apps.
And don't get me started on opening up a movie or game after work's done. "Set your brightness so the logo is barely visible." Yeah, no. "Game of Thrones is a cinematic show and therefore you have to watch it like you’re at a cinema: in a darkened room." Wagner and Snyder are watching their productions on studio-grade OLEDs. I won't put a show on the integrated screen of my old Thinkpad or Precision laptops, I know those displays are trash (and they're small, I only put stuff that's easy to see on them), but no brightness setting on my relatively nice IPS LCDs can comfortably handle the diversity of content they're used to display.
[1] https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=828282&...
[2] https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=999999&...
>Gee, this stark white brightness is hurting my eyes, maybe I should turn down the brightness on my display...
>Nah, I'll just demand every single company completely overhaul the CSS and contrast of everything while begrudgingly suffering the eye-burning whiteness of companies that haven't yet overhauled their CSS
Like wtf?
Instead, it varies wildly, often for good reasons... and then switching windows exposes you to extreme shifts. E.g. switch between photograph editing and a giant white text document, nothing's gonna save you then - stuff that looks correct and good for photography is absurd when most of your screen is the same as the sun.
Calibration is one thing, perceived brightness of the whole screen with specific content is another. And it's heavily influenced by how many nits are available.
Taking it to the DPI example, having things built at a standardised DPI isn't about making everything appear the same physical size it's about making everything tuned against a consistent physical size for the exact same reason, default is always intended and your global adjustments are always consistently resulting in the source material being larger than intended or smaller than intended instead of "well, depends how uncalibrated the source was if it's still smaller or larger than intended".
You seem to be assuming the commenter you replied to didn't know that. As I understood it, all they were saying is that advice about calibration is useless for people who don't do photo editing, but whose problem is exactly that different windows have such wildly varying brightness that switching from one to another often makes everything look either pitch dark or third-degree-interrogation light in your eyes.
Which category of people do you think there are more of? My bet is on the latter. They need... Well, if you don't want to call it "another kind of calibration", you're free to come up with another term.
I like being able to see my phone in sunlight nowadays, but there have definitely been some tradeoffs.
No. You just use them in the dark.
To play PS5 I bought a monitor instead of a TV, because the place where I had to install the screen in the rented apartment is tiny, and tiny TVs are just crap with tons of input lag. So I got a gaming LG monitor.
Many PS5 games, specially those with HDR support, offer help in adjusting the brightness, often in the form of showing a very dark and a very bright image side by side, and telling you to adjust your settings until both are visible.
I found out that no matter what I do, this never happens. In the end the best setting is when NEITHER are visible. If the dark image is visible, the screen is so bright it feels like staring into a flashlight. If the bright image is visible, the screen is so dark that I can't see the contents of the screen with my curtains open or the lights turned on. I can't wrap my head around how someone can make a screen be so crap.
You, however, should stay in the dark.
I'm not the OP, but yes, going outside sometimes also hurts my eyes, depending on how bad the sun is.
Display manufacturers should really not just look at the maximum brightness but also the minimum.
Anyway, I prefer the ever so slightly beige Interface of Windows 2000. Same contrast and GUI esthetics, but less drab grey.
Yep. Without darkmode, my screens light up my neighbors fence like those Appalachian backyard streetlights.
( because powerpole streetlights were popular in rural backyards ref: https://assets.landandfarm.com/resizedimages/10000/0/h/80/1-... )
Especially with this new "don't theme my app" movement. It's really unfortunate. The issues with CSS stylesheets in GTK should be solved with replacing CSS with a better way to describe styles, not with just throwing it all away and not letting the user set their own themes.
The first type of CSS can be written succinctly, but the second cannot.
The developers basically say "fuck you" if your use case does not perfectly align with their "vision".
What I hate is installing a program that was designed for a KDE distro and because you run gnome all the icons are the same color as the background and alignments on things are whack.
Package it all up in a flatpak so it looks and works exactly the same on all distros. One complete and verified experience.
The user should be in control of his computer. That includes the programs on it. Locking it down so you can have "verified authentic design" is just straight-up user-hostile.
The programs can still be open source so you can recompile with whatever look you want, but they should bundle a working experiance by default.
But linux users seem more obsessed with curating custom themes over having things actually work.
Linux userspace is buggy, and I think this very-minimalistic approach sort of grown out from frustration about that. And they may be right, maintainers really don’t have the resources to do much better, especially when most frameworks they depend on has their own share of fatal, almost impossible to fix bugs.
I suspect even their attitude towards theming done by end-users is more akin to ‘well sure, if you insist, you have the full source code, I can’t stop you, but you’re on your own’ than considering it a fully supported configuration.
There can also be legitimate reasons not to support it. On the top of my head, for example, the default theme being the most tested, etc., etc. In a perfect world, they'd all be tested and well integrated, but there's limited man power going around, and the world isn't perfect.
Though I otherwise agree.
Maybe distros are not doing a good job of this, but that is one thing they have the power to do. QT, GTK2, SDL, wxwidgets, and more toolkits I can't even think of should all fit together on my desktop and look the same. xfce, gnome, and kde all have some nice apps, they should mix and match. This is a HARD problem, but that isn't an excuse to not face it.
I would reject a distro that did this (unless I could disable it). But users should be able to make everything look the way that works the best for them.
We could shift cultural expectations so that distro maintainers become the first tier of support for all app issues in their distro, and escalate issues to app developers if and only if they've confirmed that the issue is distro-agnostic. That would be sustainable for app developers but could be a heavy burden for small distro teams.
> This is a HARD problem, but that isn't an excuse to not face it.
Agreed, I just don't think it's the responsibility of app developers to solve.
The concept of "white point" is often spoken of in terms of color, but brightness very much does matter too. It is painful for there to be something (especially something large) brighter than "white".
**
That said, we should have automatic dark mode based in inverting HSL's "lightness" (this can trivially be done directly in RGB, just check the min and max color channel of the pixel, then adjust all channels to flip them), rather than requiring ad-hoc color schemes all over the place.
https://lunar.fyi/sensor
CRT monitors had easy dials to quickly adjust brightness and contrast. You almost did it automatically without thinking when you had developed the motor memory. Nowadays monitor controls are often fiddly and awkward. But I still use them to adjust brightness to the environment.
Non-exhaustive list:
Linux: https://github.com/ddccontrol/ddccontrol || https://github.com/rockowitz/ddcutil
macOS: https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl
Windows: https://github.com/emoacht/Monitorian
Works on both Windows and Mac
Twinkle Tray is an alternative: https://github.com/xanderfrangos/twinkle-tray
(Of course, that was a lot of money when we were both young...)
Up. Down. I'm really not sure....
When I was 20, the idea that my eyesight might have become meaningfully worse over time never really occurred to me. Fascinating.
In the physical world that'd be issues like bright points like car headlamps or street lights having a large corona/starburst, or if you're looking at a bright object against a dark background such as reading a book where it's lit in a darker room the 'bloom' will obscure what's behind it. On a screen with much brightness I'll get similar effects if there's contrast. I've been window shopping for a HDR display for a while now and wondering how much benefit I'd get out of it seeing as the main selling points are the brightness/contrast, especially when you're getting into the various forms of local dimming to present the media at its best.
For me, with (mostly-corrected) astigmatism and some (uncorrectable) higher-order aberration, dark on light is the only thing I can read fluently. The worst case is ‘black holes’ on a light page, as are fashionable for illustrating command line examples (and f—ing github's CI log view), especially combined with Las Vegas syntax colouring of varying brightness.
Earlier we had ICCCM (inter client communication convention manual). Now we have freedesktop.org.
Have you tried dark mode in Windows 11? It turns the entire window bar black, if multiple window bars happen to overlap it is impossible to tell them apart visually. On top of that in some programs it also turns the close/min/max window buttons completely black unless hovered by the cursor!
Microsoft should fire everyone at the company who ever made a UX design decision - except for the people who made the Windows Phone 8 UI, their only consistent and intuitive UI in the last 15 years.
The other criticisms are valid though, the last good Explorer UI was Windows 7.
I don't know what you mean about turning the window bar black. Did you set the theme to "high contrast"? I've used dark mode on windows since it became an OS feature and never had that problem.
Microsoft's UX has been poor since Win8, but not for graphical reasons. 10 and 11 look great out of the box - far better than any other OS I've seen, although tbf I haven't done much distro-hopping.
The first thin I do on MacOS is turn on the scroll bars. Yes, MacOS Has them set as "Only Show When Scrolling" by default, which is probably the most ridiculous setting.
Not having them take up screen real estate and working with most people's usage styles while being configurable for others is the right decision. The problem is systems and applications that don't let you configure them.
People talk about accessibility and their preferences like they are absolute truths— it's a lot more complex. Not having scroll bars sucks for people that never got comfortable with other scrolling input methods and people who use sight interfaces, for example. They couldn't possibly be less relevant to people who use screen readers, and as an input method rather than an Univision visual indicator, only slightly more relevant to people on phones and tablets. Phone and tablet usage has outpaced regular computer usage for quite some time, and that informs users interaction style. Adding visible UI elements adds cognitive load, and for people who never worked with scroll bars out of necessity, they're just another bulky animated distraction on the screen. Most younger users would probably think them about as useful as an always-visible on-screen keyboard.
I guarantee you— the designers at Apple who chose to hide those scroll bars probably thought more about scrolling more than every one of these commenters combined, and that was before they did formal usability studies.
Spot the indication that not all settings sections are shown in this screenshot, in all display settings and lighting conditions that your device might be used in.
https://imgur.com/a/pMUKwjT
https://imgur.com/a/2ADNH2B
* Were they ever there? I can't believe this dialog background - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2001/10/macosx-10-1/4/ - was the "winner" in any usability study. This was removed in 2003-11 with the release of 10.3.
b) Problems with specific dialog boxes or dynamically created features is evidence of problems with those dialog boxes or dynamically created features. As someone who's worked both as a developer and a designer, often the engineers win.
c) Assuming that these topics are simple enough for off-the-cuff reckonin' to validate or invalidate them are exactly why the engineers shouldn't win when it comes to interface decisions.
Of course I learned long ago and so I'm willing to accept that what was best practices back then might be wrong given new research that I'm not aware of. However this seems unlikely.
From what I've seen from colleagues in the consumer space they've predominantly switched to A/B testing and statistical clickstream/log analyses, though large companies sometimes still do run lab studies for important decisions and to rationalize the giant one-way mirror they installed.
Or I go to the store and I buy heroin. I’m a heroin user and I use the heroin.
These UIs we speak of, are they hammers, or are they heroin?
Because I’m currently looking at a high contrast screen using a mixture of Unix tools created from the late 60s to yesterday.
I’m looking at an Excel spreadsheet made by a team of lawyers that is in a UI. The lawyers themselves highlighted and handled the contrast of the document. Beyond the table itself, Excel’s menu bar is easy to read for the basic operating needs of a spreadsheet. I mean come on, the pivot table UI is clearly masterful. (If Excel was a native plaintext tabular format and you could pipe stdin/out to the GUI app? Gimme!)
However, a lot of software is basically useless these days. It’s not designed from the beginning to be productive in any shape or form.
Some stoned dance by a junkie under a highway overpass is definitely some kind of expressive art form. How much more productive is the expressive art forms promoted by TikTok, Twitter or Twitch?
There’s clearly a scale at play. I’m as big fan of Twitch as much as I’m a big fan of the Buffalo Bills. I’ve always appreciated the sociological aspects of sports. To add some context to my definition of productivity, I would say that group sporting events are overall productive from a sociological perspective, be it IPL cricket or Fortnite tournaments.
TikTok is clearly and quite obviously towards the junkie dance scale of things.
From an experiential position there was not much of a difference between my observations of a woman filming herself doing a weird little dance on the sidewalk while completely oblivious to the rest of the world and the junky on the next block doing a weird little dance on the sidewalk while completely oblivious to the rest of the world. This basic object-level assessment of the actions that we and others experience with our physical bodies is core to the very notion of “meaning”. The “meaning” is just the stoned dance.
I know of no junkies famous for only being junkies but there are definitely TikTokers famous for only being TikTokers so don’t confuse this for some strict equivalence.
I’m just trying to establish a kind of framework for discussing the relationship between productive UI and productive software tools.
A hammer is useful for doing stuff, which modern UIs increasingly aren't. So it seems they aren't hammers.
B) if you're doing dev work, you're probably not entirely cognizant of how different your software selection and usage patterns are than most people's, even for non-dev things.
C) there's a whole lot of interfaces out there and the great ones work so naturally and intuitively that you don't even notice them. Those are the ones for which many assume the design decisions were so obvious that they didn't even need designers. That's so so not true.Look at the most popular user-facing software: web browsers are all obsessed with usability (mozilla actually does some of the best open usability research out there.) Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, Twitter, et al... Incredibly clear and usable for their target market. Can't get much higher contrast than you do in email applications and other communication apps. There are tools to guage if your text color/background color/ and text size make for readable text according to the WCAG and I have never had a job, either as a designer or as a developer, where AA compliance wasn't a minimum for all functional elements. Most common user-facing interfaces that regularly use light or white text on colored backgrounds, like the iMessage interface or signal, benefit from OS-level accessibility enhancements like increased text size, which are very commonly used among the people who need them. My non-tech-savvy elderly relatives all knew about them through the setup process on their devices when they first bought them, and never looked back. Looking through every communication or other popular user-facing software package on my Galaxy U22 using a default theme shows nothing even remotely low-contrast.
This blind appeal to authority shouldn't convince anyone.
You haven't actually made an argument worth arguing about. It's devoid of value and it's not a productive addition to the conversation.
And don't bother wasting any more of my time. I don't care. You clearly have nothing to say.
"Informs"?!? Deforms!
WTF does phone usage have to do with sabotaging the UI on a computer???
This does not excuse making terrible user experiences elsewhere.
I have used MacOS every day for 10 years and i've never, except in exceptional circumstances, used the scrollbar to scroll. I don't see anybody in my circle using it. They all have the "Only Show When Scrolling" setting on.
I don't think this is ridiculous and I would enable the setting if turned off by default.
I also spend 99% percent of my time in full-screen mode in safari, vscode or terminal. So the top bar is also hidden by default. I think this is much more focused.
It is a choice, you can turn it on or off.
People with cataracts may benefit from dark mode. People with glaucoma or higher order aberrations (e.g. me) may benefit from light mode. Web sites should use `prefers-color-scheme`; native GUI programs should use the native equivalents (or default colours); command-line programs should not assume a particular background.
Edit: there's a comment chain that fell off the first page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37865396
It used to be easy to adjust contrast and brightness on a display, volume on an amplifiee, an analog TV, a termostat, a car radio, etc.
I realize that we are not really on course (yet?) for reintroducing a lot of analog controls, but in the end, our world is analog. Input is analog via speech, muscle motion, etc. Output is analog, via light and other vibrations that reach our senses. Why isn't control more analog? It's probably a cost thing.
I would totally buy a display or a laptop with analog controls. I don't even care if the turn dial actually has 16M steps, so long as the response is pretty much immediate and feels like a real potentiometer. It should feel like direct manipulation and like you're in control, instead of these digital roundabout abominations.
As to the subject, I imagine having some knobs that I can adjust under different circumstances to quickly vary intensity or cycle through alternatives in order to make things more readable or audible.
90% Of what we do is in the browser today. Browsers could have an "accessibility" API such that turn knobs (bluetooth? whatever) could be used for control. Like scroll wheels but on steroids?
Dish forced a new remote on us last time a device broke and they replaced it. It has far fewer buttons. I’m sure it helps getting familiar with it on a super basic level. But the old one wasn’t that complicated anyhow.
But here’s the kicker: there’s no fast forward or rewind buttons. There no stop button. No record button. All of these (and more) have been turned into menu items and/or secret chords on the remote.
Oh. And it has a mic on it too. Hard pass.
Tv remote is just the easy example. I see it all over the place. Sleek no longer is pretty to my eyes. If I see something that I have to interact with these days and it looks sleek, I see frustration.
It's really a shame how user-hostile design can be.
[0] https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA?feature=shared
I remember when Front Row for the Mac was announced. I loved Front Row (although the supported content was far too limited).
But despite Fromt Row’s limited functionality and simplistic interface, the Apple Remote still didn’t feel adequate.
It's like a 747 cockpit.
That’s another thing I like about the analog world.
Multifunction buttons… that never existed in the analog world? Or is that what is called “mode”? Send vs receive etc. Does anyone have a concrete example?
I’m not a remote control designer but I would think it would be fun to give it a try! Maybe I will :)
I like it.
Particularly if one thing affects another in a ripple-effect or chain reaction. It is great to be able to adjust at least two values at once. Keeps you from going back-and-forth adjusting in ever smaller increments to get to the settings you want.
generally most want to have a knob they can adjust and not worry about the underlying value. It's in line with the philosophy of tweaking settings and not using your eyes to judge if its in the right position.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph
I want actual physical knobs.not sure what that would be called. Potentiometers?
There are of course things where more specialized inputs are required, but for the rest, touchscreens are here to stay*
* One improvement I would like to see it about their surface — we can no longer blind type on phones, because we can’t feel the borders of the buttons - but I think we have the tech to dynamically make the screen’s surface rougher/smoother. Another idea is to bring back 3D touch (and potentially improve on that - maybe it could even take some 3D vector as input?)
That looks familiar somehow... How many leaves should I pay you for this insight?
I’ve seen this trend going on for over a decade now, like a slow parabolic arc. Somehow the aim of developers and designers turned around 180 degrees and became less and less about pleasing the users and more and more about impressing other people in your field. (Both programming and design.)
The HN submission (320 comments) here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356511>
Ello has been down for months now with issues at TalentHouse AG (apparently in or near bankruptcy), and archives of that site at both the Wayback Machine and the (usually successful) Archive Today ... show no actual content best I can tell.
Sigh.
This feature still exists, with a larger clickable surface, but with lower affordance – the entire area above and below the scroll bar is a "button" for exactly that purpose.
Also: using the little buttons, you can position the cursor once and then click repeatedly for repeated movements, taking you ultimately to the very top or bottom of the page. But when clicking the scroll bar, page movement generally stops as soon as the slider moves underneath your cursor.
The browser's UI should more or less be fully off the table when it comes to what a website can change, and that includes scrollbars.
I think this might be it:
<https://www.makeuseof.com/change-firefox-scrollbar-style/>
"Imagine being able to configure anything useful in chrome ever."
Overall, a very well written article - kudos to the author.
(I've made the switch to FF again myself after Edge just got too annoying with their constant nagging about Bing search and other features. And the prompt to restore tabs. Just STFU and stop it already.)
The only thing that IMHO needs improvement in Chrome scroll bars is that the knob is light grey on lighter grey.
edit: https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/15kk98z/how_can... looks promising
I changed the setting for widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override from 1 to 50 and it increased size.
The initial value of 1 was confusing me because I kept thinking it is Boolean 1.
Posting a solution here in case someone else finds it useful.
about:config is invaluable, but better documentation on the options would really be nice.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/minimap-scrol...
I have a very strong recollection of adamantly defending IE6's ability to style scroll bars on forums in the early 2000s, whereas the Mozilla crowd at the time called it an abomination.
As an older man with both the power of hindsight and the weakness of failing sight, I can admit I was wrong. It's far too apt to abuse
Yeah, terrible scroll bar UI these days is a PIA.
Yeah, opening up the inspector and updating the author's CSS made it readable for me, but made the shell script unreadable.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/Ynvrm3p.png
On a computer I can just use light mode and it’s fine. Driving at night … I really hate bright lights on tall SUVs.
Here’s an example of what it looks like (glasses help): https://beta-ctvnews-ca.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/beta.ctvnews....
It's to the point that if highlighting all the text doesn't mitigate the dark/white contrast, I'll just avoid reading that page entirely.
I suppose you have already tried to decrease the brightness of your screen. Say, 400 nit at 100% brightness is searing, unless you're under sunlight.
I love coding with white themes and full brightness. Never feel tired. Very lucky in that sense.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...
For me, the solution to this is:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/font-contrast...
Forces the text to black at least. Pretty reliable. Sometimes needs overrides which are easy to do.
One really good thing in the last five years has been most major user interfaces now having both a dark mode and a light mode.
It wouldn’t matter if they did. I’ve been a web developer for nearly 25 years and have worked with many many designers. You know they care about? Pixel perfect layouts that match their “vision”. UX isn’t even a fleeting thought.
A scrollbar is not only a control, it's also an indicator. It shows where your viewport is relative to the bigger view, e.g. a long list. Hiding scrollbars, like some [redacted] GUIs like macOS do, is just acutely impolite, much like making buttons indistinguishable from text, or putting light grey text on a light grey background.
A solution exists, and is nearly universally implemented: scroll wheels on a mouse, and scroll gestures on a trackpad. Very, very rarely do I find a view which can be scrolled by scrollbars, but cannot be scrolled by the standard trackpad gesture, or by a mouse wheel. (BTW my mouse also allows horizontal scrolling using the wheel; so do trackpoint controls, too.)
Such scrolling does not require the pointer to even be at a scrollbar; the pointer just need to hover over the desired view / control / widget. This is really easy to achieve with imprecise input devices, unsteady hands, and poor vision.
But with this natural, easy way of scrolling one starts to really miss scrollbars in their indicator role.
(Regarding minimaps: sometimes they are helpful, sometimes not so much. I in particular find them unhelpful and bulky for text editing, but of course I'm all in favor of having them as an option for those who enjoy them.)
So you didn't read the article huh. The very first paragraph says:
>“Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen.
Or literally the next paragraph about difficulties small/hidden scrollbars cause with other input methods, e.g. eye trackers.
A scrollbar is (also) an indication, glanceable, not requiring any action.
If someone among your friends and family has an iOS device, remember how many times you had to show them that certain screens can be scrolled down? Oh, not just down, but also to the right? There used to be a few perfectly aligned views that had no indication whatsoever that there's more to them is you scroll.
Narrow but visible scrollbars would solve this easily.
> If someone among your friends and family has an iOS device, remember how many times you had to show them that certain screens can be scrolled down?
I don't know, zero? Maybe let's say once to be charitable.
This is not a real problem faced by most people. IMO, this is just people being used to doing it another way.
- scrollbars overlaying the content, rather than having dedicated space
- scrollbars that auto-hide when not in use
- scrollbars that are initially narrow, then widen when you mouse-over
- removal of the scroll buttons
That's not including the visual design changes, which are arguably important too (e.g. the scroll "thumb" now has a very flat design rather than textured so it looks draggable).
Edit to add: oh yeah, one more I forgot: in classic Mac OS the scroll thumb had a fixed size, now it reflects the size of the viewport. That one is a useful and positive change, though. Not sure where that innovation came from but it wasn't the Mac.
I agree the proportional scrollbar was good.
You cannot restore the scroll bar width or buttons.
Frankly, it's broken behavior.
How do you do that glancing at an always visible scroll bar?
Assuming a properly responsive document (not something you can take for granted today, especially on the web), you can readily use the scrollbar to navigate large ranges within a document, especially large ones.
Countless times, on large, old PDFs with no links and that use that kind of “B-29” section page numbering have I essentially used the scrollbar to binary search the document for some buried page.
Of course the modern web has practically destroyed the applicability of the scrollbar as indicator because of the rampant use of lazy loading and endless scrolling. Many times on the Mac I’ve tried to use Cmd-down arrow to jump to the end of the document, hoping that there IS an end, and that it will load all of embeds that wreak havoc with the formatting.
But, alas, I find I’m on some endless train, with no hope of knowing how far I’ve gone or how far I have to go.
All that said, I happen to have a weighted mouse wheel on a bearing that is specifically designed for high velocity doom scrolling, partly because the scrollbar is effectively useless.
IME, only on Linux am I able to click on an arbitrary location beneath or atop the scrollbar and be taken there immediately. On Windows, it seems that clicking below the scrollbar is equivalent to scrolling down once. If you want to go all the way to the bottom of the document or webpage, you have to drag the scrollbar all the way down manually. I actually find it kind of annoying. I don't know about MacOS, as I haven't used it since I was a kid.
Have you tried changing the behavior in Settings?
But that breaks down if you have to scroll a very long way.
[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromium-wheel-smo..., https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yass-we
Thank you! finally someone understands what a scrollbar is for. It primary job is to show the user that the document is bigger than the window, and secondly, to show which part of the document is visible. Letting the user scroll around is not the primary function!
I was genuinely surprised when Apple started hiding scrollbars by default in macOS. Their UI designers clearly don't have a clue what the basic UI controls really do.
Wacom/pen users don't have a scroll wheel.
Many trackballs don't have a scroll wheel. Some have a scroll ring around the ball though.
I got RSI in my scrolling finger, so I removed the scroll wheel from my mice. And there have been times that I have overstretched my mouse-arm and had to use a trackball with my other hand for a few weeks.
Gentoo is a great learning exercise, but Arch has me focusing on doing things.
I remember some horrors in my lifetime: WinAMP skins, browser skins, people recklessly ignoring all of the wisdom collected on asktog.com...
But the horrors became so frequent that we all became numb, and now even Windows ships with more UI disarray than could have been imagined in the early 2000s...
The hardest part of becoming a greybeard is realizing what could have been, that we have abandoned.