Apple's scroll bar allergy leads to some quite funny (to me, anyway) problems with major websites. Some companies seem to have their entire web dev + QA + management staff on Macbooks, because on any other desktop platform their websites are COVERED in useless scrollbars that scroll maybe one or two pixels. I've even seen scrollbars cover up half part of a company's logo.

All of that money spent on hyper expensive laptops, and people still end up with terribly ugly websites!

Yep - overflow: scroll rather than overflow: auto. I've seen Google fall foul of this

Disappearing scrollbars pisses me off as well.

But I can tell you how/why (I think) it happened.

They dropped them in iOS when the iPhone rolled out. It made sense given the small display area where even a 10 to 12 pixel column makes a difference.

And then, sadly, there came the slow roll to make both MacOS and iOS look the same and so they started auto-hiding on the Mac as well.

It's the form-before-function that I loathe ever since Jony started making round mice or USB connectors impossible to find.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of designers in software.

- designers who come from an advertising/visual design/motion design/packaging/print (although those are a dying breed)/etc background.

Those people care more about how things look in a video commercial or on a giant billboard, and they care about visual aesthetics and making something that catches your eye because it looks really good.

- designers who come from an interaction/HCI/usability/accessibility/etc background

Those people care about things more from a systems point of view, how features will behave across a variety of contexts/modalities, how users come to understand them over time, etc. They had more of a voice in the 80s/90s (Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, etc are in that category) but have been increasingly in the minority ever since.

(Designers who come from an industrial design background are a bit of a wildcard - some will put superficial fit & finish above all else, while others really get how good ergonomics, tactility, etc can translate to software).

Honestly, there's value in both. Users will judge a book by its cover, and you want interfaces to look attractive and be compelling - designers from the latter group will be content with designing interfaces that just look like black and white wireframes.

But at the same time, you don't want pure aesthetics to run completely orthogonal to core usability. So it's a balance, and software interfaces are usually worse off when that balance is out of whack.

Anyways, I'll let you guess what category of designers are overrepresented in Apple's ranks. Hint: their current head of interface design comes from a magazine design background.

Yeah annoys me too.

You can turn them back on everywhere in Settings -> Appearance -> Show scroll bars always.

This is actually a kind of important setting to turn on if you're doing web development. At my work the developers use MacBooks and it's not rare to get bug reports about double scrollbars and whatnot which are caused by certain nested views with bad CSS, but it wasn't caught before release because the developer doesn't have scrollbars turned on, so you don't see it until a Windows user tries it.

Yeah that was already done. But it doesn't help too much. They kinda still fade in and out sometimes -- but I can't get a proof right now. In addition, they are still too narrow.

OK at least VSCode still does this ->

- Turned on "Always show Scrollbar" in MacOS setting

- Turned on "visible" in VSCode for vertical scrollbars

Check the explorer window -> scrollbar doesn't show up unless your mouse somehow touches the area.

But this is probably a VSCode thing though.

That isn't a VSCode thing. I have "always how scroll bars" enabled at the OS level and across many apps it only shows when the mouse is over the scrollable area. You know, because the accessibility setting is really just a poorly worded suggestion now.

Wait, does that mean there is an option to actually always show scroll bars under Accessibility? I need to check it out.

> why Apple UI designers hate scroll bars with such a passion.

It takes courage.

I mean as a user I haven’t thought about a scroll bar in years. The way the OS works with the hardware for touchpad usage means it’s just not a big deal.

Even when I used a mouse on a Mac desktop it still never bothered me. Looks cleaner, feels sleeker and doesn’t impact functionality.

I don't know, but missing scrollbars is very frustrating in some cases. I literally missed some configurations because of that when I first used a Mac. There was a configuration window that needed some scrolling to show all options, but I missed that because there is no scroll bars.

Yeah but I agree that everyone has their own flavors. I personally prefer the Windows 2000 ones...I'm old. Never liked the flat ones, looks soulless.

You missed an indication that you need to scroll, that's certainly bad design, though fixing it doesn't require the full fat bar (not that I'd object to a proper global setting for users who like that!).

(flatness is a universal cancer, though, even compared to the ugliness of the old Win)