No, you shouldn't style your scrollbars when they are part of the browser chrome and simply scroll a page. Yes, you should be able to style your scrollbars when they're part of your website/application.
Those JS solutions out there are quite sucky. Oh, hey, sorry, we just broke scrolling down using your spacebar.
Stylable scroll bars are definitely a slippery slope. Once you allow it, you are possibly opening the gate for really bad scroll bars that pervert an essential ui of browsers. On the other hand, lots of people demand custom scroll bars, which leads to shitty scroll experiences because every js implementation is bound to perform badly in one scenario ot another.
So, it sounds like just a bad idea. I don't understand -- why do people think it's a good idea for web pages to style my scrollbar?
I wonder if there's something of an age/cultural separation at play here. Back in the 90s when desktop environments were a point of wide discussion and interest, there was a piece of "common knowledge" that it's important for all the user's applications to have a consistent look+feel. Furthermore, that look+feel was in their control via desktop manager settings: so you could choose large font-sizes, high-contrast window borders and cursors, scrollbar widths, stuff like that.
The web used to follow that same themeing, or at least tried to; hence specific UI controls were part of HTML, and the browser could defer to the platform toolkit to render them. That mechanism has been abandoned by the Web as it has moved towards a full application-platform, where every webpage re-implements its own toolkit and decides how things should look+feel. Which is directly the opposite of the "consistent-look desktop" philosophy.
There are some good reasons why that happened, but I think a whole lot of bad ones too. Taking the user's scrollbar out of their control, into the webpage designer's, is just another UI control ripe for abuse.
I guess the only question is that, since webpages render their own controls for everything else, shouldn't they be able to make the Firefox scrollbar consistent with the rest of it? But then, why is the Firefox scrollbar coming into play at all, when they could already just implement their own as a Javascript control?
The user should never be given control. Users are terrible at determining their own experience. A good designer knows what the user wants better than the user.
Of course, there are bad designers, but they get filtered out by users not going back to their site.
In the end, the designer should have control over every pixel on his product. Any OS branding should disappear from view, because the web advances faster than OS UI design.
Also, this problem was the same back in the 90's. There was the default terrible OS user interface, and some apps decided to make their own much nicer interface.
Kai Power Tools immediately comes to mind, as well as any game with their own UI.
> the designer should have control over every pixel on his product.
That's why I can't increase the font sizes or zoom in on mobile browsing, to aid my poor eyesight. Sigh. Why should USERS never have control, but you give bad designers a free pass? That's an awfully totalitarian view of computing, and leads to many unbearable situations.
> Of course, there are bad designers, but they get filtered out by users not going back to their site.
No. As I mentioned in another comment, you can't just pick-and-choose websites like equivalent oranges. Each website is different, and while occasionally you can choose which blog you read, you can't so easily select which government agency you need to engage with. We all have to deal with the designer's choices, good or bad.
A tangent, but back to this:
> the designer should have control over every pixel on his product.
How is it appropriate to discuss the web in this manner? The web is a communication mechanism, and it was intended to be easy for people -- end users, real people -- to make their own webpages. Now it's just for "products" created by professional designers? We have given up so much.
> We all have to deal with the designer's choices, good or bad.
You'll have to deal with them anyways. Every government site is pretty much horrible - they don't even need any advanced UI capabilities to make them unusable.
This discussion is about enabling advanced UI capabilities for top designers.
> How is it appropriate to discuss the web in this manner? The web is a communication mechanism, and it was intended to be easy for people -- end users, real people -- to make their own webpages.
The web is a one-way communications medium. It's not a two-way medium. You'll need to go to phone/chat/email for that.
And, with a one-way medium, the message should be decided by the sender, not the receiver.
I'll keep using ad blockers, user scripts, and user style sheets (I've been using the latter since IE4), and you can keep allowing designers to control every pixel on your screen.
Were you disappointed when Flash sites fell out of favor? Users has so little control over those sites.
OK but you're not the audience these sites are designed for.
How many fashion sites do you visit? Do you use your own style-sheets when browsing them? How does your own font enhance your shopping for their fashion items?
sometimes the System scrollbar feel very wide and big if you have a slim container that have a scrollbar.
Or it can steal focus from the content it self, if your website is a darkly colored one and you have massive light grey scrollbar in middle of the site.
Sometimes the scrollbar is big and wide for a reason. I recently was asked to find out the registry settings on Windows CE to make all scrollbars forty pixels wide so they could be used effectively on a cheap resistive touchscreen.
there will always be bad scroll bars or confusing websites, people will just stop using those sites, but that shouldn't prevent people who make a nice scroll bar from doing so.
People don't have much choice over what websites they access. People rely on websites, and basically every webpage provides different utility, so we're all stuck with what the designer published. Very many designers are bad, due in large part to the complexity of the web.
True, but most browsers beside IE already support this, and people should be getting used to different kinds of scroll bars, from various apps to programs which doesn't use the system scroll bar.
Why should people be getting used to different UIs for different things? Why shouldn't we consolidate, so that there is a single consistent UI?
It's not very easy, for example, for the elderly, and persons with some types of disability, to get used to things changing all the time, and having a different mental context for the controls of one site/application vs another.
There isn't even a Consistent UI as it is, System Scroll Bar is not a consistent thing, it changes by OS, or theme of OS if you are into that sort of thing.
But users choose their own OS/themes, or at a minimum they get used to one particular one that was chosen for them.
I think computer people really underestimate how much the average user values consistency and predictability, and how much they hate change. There's no other tool we ask humans to use that looks and acts completely differently every 2-5 years.
Edit: Actually, on thinking about this, computer people also value consistency: How would you like it if all your vim keybindings were changed? They just don't extend that courtesy to their users.
Funny to see how the original bug reporter (Skewer) hung around for about 18 months before other people continued the discussion for the past 13 years. I wonder where Skewer is today and what he thinks about the feature.
personally i would rather they made the scroll bar like in IE, Where it doesn't push content, but it is on top of it so whole page doesn't get pushed slightly if it appear dynamically.
There is a number of user styles (installable with Stylish [1]) that replace default scroll bars with floating ones. I find this [2] particularly nice.
These kinds of floating scroll bars really should be the default for all OSes. Presence of scroll bars changing the width of the window contents and causing repaints/reflows is really poor UX in my humble opinion.
Those JS solutions out there are quite sucky. Oh, hey, sorry, we just broke scrolling down using your spacebar.