Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don’t want you to scroll! “Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time.
Yeah but you should also understand that if design minded people really care about this they can make a difference. It’s not up to chrome and firefox it’s fully in the control of the designers who make the products you use. And the trend is to not have huge bars. My comment was more addressed to those people as I know there are a lot of them who frequent this site. Like myself.
And from my point of view it’s better for the browser to remain as design neutral as possible to allow creators more flexibility. There are a lot of use cases where huge scroll bars caused a all kinds of issues in the past. What we have now is a result of years of people arguing about this stuff.