Scroll wheels and gestures are paging mechanisms, a scrollbar does that as well but it’s also a “take me to the middle of the document” control.
Assuming a properly responsive document (not something you can take for granted today, especially on the web), you can readily use the scrollbar to navigate large ranges within a document, especially large ones.
Countless times, on large, old PDFs with no links and that use that kind of “B-29” section page numbering have I essentially used the scrollbar to binary search the document for some buried page.
Of course the modern web has practically destroyed the applicability of the scrollbar as indicator because of the rampant use of lazy loading and endless scrolling. Many times on the Mac I’ve tried to use Cmd-down arrow to jump to the end of the document, hoping that there IS an end, and that it will load all of embeds that wreak havoc with the formatting.
But, alas, I find I’m on some endless train, with no hope of knowing how far I’ve gone or how far I have to go.
All that said, I happen to have a weighted mouse wheel on a bearing that is specifically designed for high velocity doom scrolling, partly because the scrollbar is effectively useless.
> Scroll wheels and gestures are paging mechanisms, a scrollbar does that as well but it’s also a “take me to the middle of the document” control.
IME, only on Linux am I able to click on an arbitrary location beneath or atop the scrollbar and be taken there immediately. On Windows, it seems that clicking below the scrollbar is equivalent to scrolling down once. If you want to go all the way to the bottom of the document or webpage, you have to drag the scrollbar all the way down manually. I actually find it kind of annoying. I don't know about MacOS, as I haven't used it since I was a kid.
>On Windows, it seems that clicking below the scrollbar is equivalent to scrolling down once. If you want to go all the way to the bottom of the document or webpage, you have to drag the scrollbar all the way down manually. I actually find it kind of annoying.
Assuming a properly responsive document (not something you can take for granted today, especially on the web), you can readily use the scrollbar to navigate large ranges within a document, especially large ones.
Countless times, on large, old PDFs with no links and that use that kind of “B-29” section page numbering have I essentially used the scrollbar to binary search the document for some buried page.
Of course the modern web has practically destroyed the applicability of the scrollbar as indicator because of the rampant use of lazy loading and endless scrolling. Many times on the Mac I’ve tried to use Cmd-down arrow to jump to the end of the document, hoping that there IS an end, and that it will load all of embeds that wreak havoc with the formatting.
But, alas, I find I’m on some endless train, with no hope of knowing how far I’ve gone or how far I have to go.
All that said, I happen to have a weighted mouse wheel on a bearing that is specifically designed for high velocity doom scrolling, partly because the scrollbar is effectively useless.