Obvious solution is obvious: restore the fucking scrollbar.
I suspect a strong driver of scrollbar deprecation is the overwhelming dominance of small-screen touch-based mobile devices. An active scrollbar, that is, one which not only shows page scroll depth, but controls it via touch, is one more UI element to generate annoying behaviours given the already perilous state of touch-based UIs. (The inability to correctly distinguish tap vs. drag or scroll actions is one that's driven me to distraction for well over a decade.)
Unfortunately, what's at least arguable on mobile becomes the trendy fashion on desktop, which is just fucking stupid.
I have some 4k pixels of width on my desktop, and some 400 on mobile. It makes sense to not have a wide scrollbar on mobile. But it makes zero sense on desktop.
Scrollbars do two things. They let you scroll (duh), but they are also progress indicators. There are other ways of scrolling (e.g. swiping on mobile) which work by default. But there is no other default way of showing progress. I don't particularly like the progress bar example in the original post, something as unobtrusive as a percentage in the bottom right corner would work just as well. But I do want some indication of progress ...
Agreeing strongly, but I'd just like to point out that a probably more significant problem on mobile is that a scrollbar which you're likely to unintentionally hit with your fingers as you're clumsily and very imprecisely interacting with your device, or as Steve Jobs so famously declared, are "holding it wrong", absolutely is a valid reason to deprecate classic indicator-and-control scrollbars on mobile devices.
That is, a classic desktop scrollbar, dating back to Xaw widgets, the original Apple desktop, and even earlier[1] not only shows where you are within a text or display, but allows you to control where you are typically by clicking on elements of that scrollbar: the cursor, the bar itself, and the endpoint arrows. Several of these had interesting / quirky / annoying variants on interaction (those familiar with early X11 Xaw widgets can likely think of several).
There's an interesting static image comparison at Reddit:
Another point on swiping: my mobile device for the past three years has been an e-ink tablet. And I've learnt that swiping absolutely sucks. E-ink displays are much faster than people seem to believe, but there's still lag that an emissive display lacks, and it's far better to page through a long text or display than to scroll through it. I've all but entirely adopted an e-ink optimised browser that mostly does this, EinkBro (based on FOSS Browser), and I am constantly trying to page through other apps by tapping where EinkBro's forward/back touch zones are. People who've used other ebook readers will be familiar with the general concept as most have similar features. Having to imprecisely scroll through a document or app is exceedingly painful.
Scrollbars partially solve this problem as for most, tapping above or below the cursor will advance the display by about a page of text (some feature a few percent overlap). On desktop systems, there's an even better option: the space bar. For a whole slew of apps and tools, dating back to Unix's pg, more, less, most, etc., you can page through a long text one screen at a time by tapping the space bar, which is the largest damned key (and hence the easiest-to-hit target) on the keyboard (Fitts's Law[2]).
By contrast, scrolling on mobile:
- Is highly subject to the tap-vs-drag confusion: the GUI cannot consistently distinguish a tap action (interacting with the application) with a drag (changing the viewpoint).
- Is imprecise both by contact point (that is where you're interacting with the display) and displacement amount (how far you're moving through a text or app). You might scroll by more or less than a page, and it takes considerable time for the eye to recapture the reading point.
- Obscures what it is you're interacting with. Your finger is covering the display you're trying to manipulate. A desktop mouse cursor by contrast covers little or none of the text or app.
- Is subject to further confusion based on dynamic characteristics of the document or app you're dealing with (e.g., a Web page with progressively-loaded or rendered elements, or on Mozilla Pocket, inconsistent placement and textblock wrapping around image elements).
I come to desperately hate scroll-based interfaces these days.
I personally like disappearing (or shrinking) scrollbars, given they appear when I scroll with a wheel, or approach towards them. It allows me to understand where I am, allows me to grab and scroll quickly when I approach them, and they allow me to see more content.
Yes, I use a big screen, but borderless and clean windows allows me to fit more content into the screen and is less distracting in general.
I respect your view. This why we (should) have options. For example, Safari doesn't auto-show scrollbars like Firefox does, and it hinders its usability a lot, if you ask me.
The user agent hasn't worked users in quite a while now. They've become optimized to work for the website owner. Scrollbar behaviour is one example of this, but so are user-hostile input fields (e.g. not being able to paste email addresses in email confirmation fields, not being able to paste passwords, autocomplete being disabled for some fields and being unable to override it, etc).
At this point, I would pay good money for an actual user agent that is worthy of the name.
But this works only if you have a scroll wheel. And then it works only vertically. Horizontally you still have to click on the invisible scrollbar. To see where you are in relation to the whole document.
In Firefox, when I start to move my mouse right, vertical scroll bar appears. Same is true for horizontal one when I move my mouse down. It happens even before I get closer to any of the scroll bars. So, a wheel/trackpad is not required per se.
Moreover, almost all mice I used except the most basic ones have horizontal scrolling capability.
I'm #notafan of customising site scrollbars. But I've written my own CSS to do that (used only on my own, non-public, Web pages), and man is it a breath of fucking fresh air.
There are other apps which are similarly fucked in this regard. Mozilla's Pocket comes to mind.
It's possible to essentially reimplement the logic of how scrollbars look, where they are, and when they appear, in just CSS on modern browsers.
Ended up having to do part of that once because it was easier at the time than to figure out just why a mismatched browser scrollbar would show up due to complex layouting issue (in embedded world, so we didn't actually have to worry about end user preference there, otherwise I wouldn't dare use such a hack)
As much as I hate what browser devs have done to scrollbars, I tend to agree with you. The one thing worse that fucked defaults is everyone throwing their own fucked personal preferences at you. Which is why sane defaults matter so damned much.
There are browser configuration tweaks which can be done in at least some cases. On Firefox Mobile / Fennec, for example, there's a configuration hack which can be done.
I'm having trouble tracking that down but I think this might be it:
I suspect a strong driver of scrollbar deprecation is the overwhelming dominance of small-screen touch-based mobile devices. An active scrollbar, that is, one which not only shows page scroll depth, but controls it via touch, is one more UI element to generate annoying behaviours given the already perilous state of touch-based UIs. (The inability to correctly distinguish tap vs. drag or scroll actions is one that's driven me to distraction for well over a decade.)
Unfortunately, what's at least arguable on mobile becomes the trendy fashion on desktop, which is just fucking stupid.