I like using scrollbars

I like to use scrollbars. I move my mouse cursor to the scrollbar handle and move it about – scrolling like this is so much faster than with the wheel if you want to scroll more than a few lines.

I didn’t notice how often I did this until sites started breaking this. It seems to be fashionable to put a margin around the entire document, resulting in the scrollbar no longer being aligned to the edge of the screen.

This is an absolute bollockache because now you can no longer just move the mouse to the edge of the screen: you need to place it exactly on the scrollbar, requiring far greater precision.

You can see an example at /scrollmargin.html. You need a device with a mouse cursor to see the problem of course.

Some real examples, all of which started doing it in the last year or so:

FastMail
Outlook365
Stack Overflow “Beta Redesign”, although that was aborted.
Spotify (example)
GitLab (example)
Couchsurfing now completely hides the scrollbar (example) (aside: I am not saying that Couchsurfing has been infiltrated by AirBnB agents to run this communist woke libtard competition in to the ground, but I am saying that nothing Couchsurfing has done over the last 10 years contradicts that hypothesis.)

There is of course also the perennial “inappropriate scrollbar styling” problem, and recently ultra low contrast have also gained popularity; for example:

Substack (example)
MariaDB documentation (example)

I’m not against any scrollbar styling; in some cases it’s appropriate. Some more playful websites, some very specific and rare webapp use cases, things like that. I’m not a “system behaviour in every single last scenario” purist. The MariaDB reference docs is very much not one of those cases.

I like using scrollbars. I can’t be the only person who does. You’re frustrating users for no reason other than following some fad that makes things look ever so marginally nicer. No one pays that much attention to your design and they won’t notice. In ten years time everyone will look back at this in the same way we look back that extremely low contrast text fad from a decade ago: “yeah, that was rather silly”.