What is the use case for scroll bars, now that we have mouse wheels? Progress indication? My view is that content is king and any UI element that needlessly takes away space from the content needs to be destroyed.
1. Position of elevator (the little thumb you traditionally drag up or down) shows where I'm at relative to the beginning and end of the content.
2. Size of elevator in relation to the scrollbar tells me what percentage of the content is viewable (except when the size of the elevator becomes so small it makes it unusable).
3. Up and down buttons allow a simple way to bring the next or previous item into view.
A lot of the hate of scrollbars comes from the web, where browser scrollbars could not be styled and didn't necessarily use the operating system's style. You could have a beautiful page be ruined by the default windows 3.11 style scrollbars in the browser.
It's always fun when the content layout naturally fits into the viewport in such a way to make it look like there's nothing down below.
Also fun when websites that are waging their holy war against the bars don't anticipate that I'm zoomed in a bit. Having to delve into devtools to disable "overflow: hidden" is a delight.
Whats worse is when a website has a footer but they have a never-ending scroll div between the header and footer so as you approach the footer more content loads pushing the footer even further down.
Just this year I was trying to explain to mom how to do something with an iPhone.
There’s about a million different secret handshakes and gestures in iOS UI, but I consider the most egregious UI failure to be the “Share” button, which manages to pop up a modal in such a way that it often disguises both that it can be be scrolled vertically AND that it can be scrolled horizontally.
Don't forget the near religious debate that is scrollbar snapback: skim a document backwards to review an earlier point, or forwards to determine if it's worth further time investment, and then release the mouse button outside the scroll area so that you can snapback and continue where you left off.
I've never seen an app that didn't have that feature. Chrome included. I don't have powerpoint around to test at the moment. I've been using this feature since the 90s, and I'd miss it sorely if it were to be disappeared.
Scrollbars are all about physicality. We are creatures fundamentally rooted in a physical world and we think in ways that are deeply connected to spatial properties of the things we interact with. Scrollbars reflect many of these properties in a natural way on a limited 2D plane (as demonstrated by all the other comments). Mouse wheels aren't able to replace that function in any way. It's not their purpose.
Indicating where you are on the page, and indicating that content can be scrolled. (I've seen webpages where there's content "below the fold" but where it's extremely easy to miss that depending on your screen size.)
Content is king, but kings have all sorts of people supporting them. In fact you can immediately tell who's the king not by how solitary and unencumbered he is but by how much clutter and commotion and how many attendants are around him. I realize I'm pushing the analogy too far.
Progress indication and scrollability indication. I'd actually like to see scrollbars enhanced rather than diminished. So for example I would love to see indicators of headings or breaks or page bookmarks. The latter could even be clickable.
I agree! A lot of code editors are using them in a nice way to display version control info or errors/warnings. Chrome is using it to a small extent when searching using Ctrl-F, showing where in the page the results are. In both cases it's super effective. But they are definitely still underused.
