Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

No. No no no. I browse hundreds even thousands of pages every singe days, and I either just close such sites or go the extra mile to write custom css for them when they are disgustingly wide.


While we're on the subject of "the user needs to become the programmer to have an acceptable experience" (sites needing my custom css added to be usable), my pet peeve is when the scrollbar is present but intentionally offset from the right edge of the screen by one pixel.

So then you hug the right edge of the screen, looking for it, where it looks like it is, and where it's been for like the entire history of computing, and then you click, and there's just nothing there.

This is a special case of Fitts's law, where a button at the edge of a screen becomes effectively infinitely wide, as far as ease-of-clicking goes.

This was used intentionally with great effect on usability in the 90s and 2000s. (Scrollbar, start menu, show desktop, etc.)

In the last decade however the trend appears to have reversed: it is now fashionable be to make the scrollbar as difficult to click as possible, by offsetting it, making it narrower, or hiding it altogether.


There is a browser out there which does something like that for every site. It has a separate area for the tabs, instead of using the full window. That could be okay. But it has a margin around it. Which means that every single scrollbar for every single page does not go to the edge of the screen, completely sabotaging easily hitting the scrollbar. Welcome to the genius of the zen browser.

https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/1126 is the issue, closed as they won't fix it (thus my snark).

> In the last decade however the trend appears to have reversed: it is now fashionable be to make the scrollbar as difficult to click as possible, by offsetting it, making it narrower, or hiding it altogether.

Afaik Ubuntu jumpstarted it with their minified GTK scrollbar, used in their Unity DE. But that thing was actually smart: It slimmed down visually, but as soon as the mouse entered its region you got the scrollbar handle at the mouse pointer's position. So it made manipulating the scrollbar even easier than a fullsized scrollbar (for at least some usage) while looking nicer. Ofc that usability aspect is something the CSS reskins and other adaptations promptly and completely forgot.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: