Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don’t want you to scroll! “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. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time.
Am I the only one who never considered normal scrollbars to be a ‘waste of space’?
It’s surprising to me how modern designers seem to care about scrollbars, but not all the white space we see on everything else.
Minimalist design really went from “maybe 38 different clickable links isn’t the most optimal way to get around this site, we should probably optimize how we use screen space” to “WE MUST GET RID OF USEFUL FEATURES SO WE CAN DISPLAY 5-8 MORE PIXELS OF WHITESPACE” in the span of a decade lol