I mourn that the scrollbar has been hunted to extinction, even on windows 11 desktop. Windows explorer slowly starts to behave like a web page app.
If you enable many columns in the explorer file view, this design is bonkers:
To navigate those columns, you need the horisontal scrollbar.
But modern design lunacy dictates that this scrollbar must be INVISIBLE.
So you have to guess where it should be, and wave your mouse around in that area, until the windows 11 geniuses decide to fade in and reveal that - oh My!, THERE WAS A SCROLL BAR THERE ALL ALONG.
So, now naive you might think "OK, we both agree there is a scrollbar there now, so maybe we can keep it in view?"
NOOOOHHH! as soon as you have used it to find your new columns, it must of course disappear again, so you must once again wave around your mouse in its general direction, next time you need it :-(.
A similar insanity happens with window borders in general, because heyaah, wow, minimalism is cool. So when you need to resize a window or, god forbid, drag it by its title bar(), that too is minimized into unrecognisability.
To be clear, the problem here is, that you can't tell where window A ends and window B begins, because of design minimalism, so it is simply hard to discern where the drag-border is.
() which leads me to window title-bar anorexia: It has also become oh so popular to minimize and compact the windows title bar, so that there is no area left where your mouse can grab the window to drag it. Web browsers, among many other apps, are guilty of this. The intent behind is to avoid the "double windows top", where you have first the title bar, then the menu below that (they have been collapsed into one);
but apparently no one thought about "but how can users then drag their windows?"..
I guess we are not supposed to, because the app is supposed to be full-screen maxxed, on the tablet we are drooling on. Or if there is another way, I, director Skinner and Homer's dad did not get the memo.
Of course there is a much better way for all your troubles!
Window move: hold a modifier and click&drag anywhere in the window area instead of wasting time precision hunting the titlebar.
Window resize: same, use a big 30%-window-width area close to the border instead of hunting for those few pixels of an actual resizable border
Horizontal scroll (though strange, Win 11 explorer has horizontal scrollbar immediately visible, though maybe that's a config?): hold a modifier and use the more convenient mouse wheel
(or use a window manager with shortcuts or visual grid)
None of that, of course, is part of your unhelpful OS
> But modern design lunacy dictates that this scrollbar must be INVISIBLE.
In a real modern design there is no lunacy as wide/tall scrollbar is mostly a space waste as you have better control options, and narrow/short ones are still that, but also unergonomic to use. So you'd have a wide/tall invisible one, which in those smaller % of cases you need them would become visible, but still wide/tall ones
> I, director Skinner and Homer's dad did not get the memo.
That's unfortunate indeed that the bad old ways of window management and scrolling persist for so long and the better ways aren't integrated in the OS
Your suggestions highlight what I hate about the new Android gestures interface. You have to know those patterns in advance and remember them. They aren't visually apparent like scroll bars, drag handles, titles bars, and window frames. I am quite versed in keyboard shortcuts, but keeping *all* of them in my head gets a bit much sometimes. When I forget one, rediscovering it is a serious PITA. The rediscovery (or initial discovery) is orders of magnitude harder for things like the Android gesture interface.
Couple this with App and OS designers feeling a *constant* need to change things and make them "better" and you have a disaster in the works. I've been grousing about Android changing things just to change them as I get older. The other day even my 12 y/o daughter was complaining about them changing how things worked.
Anyway, my point is simply two-fold. First, any UI that requires knowing and remembering interactions that aren't easily discovered *is a problem*. Second, constantly changing UI interaction patterns, even when they are discoverable, *is also a problem*.
Oh, sure, those are indeed major fails in all of the OSes - no guides and no easy way to find anything about fundamental operations (it should be easier than googling).
But these are separate issues. For example, even with the scrollbars there can be a change between two behaviors: click on the empty bar jumps to that % or jumps by 1 page. And one can be a click and another a Shift-Click - where in the OS would you discover that??? And the scrollbar width - can only find a registry hack to restore that from some tech article/blog post/ etc, nothing in that waste of the Win 11 Settings app.
But with a visible scrollbar you would have a visible indication which behavior you triggered. If the scrollbar is invisible you get a changed viewport in both cases but you have to infer which gesture triggers which behavior.
A similar insanity happens with window borders in general, because heyaah, wow, minimalism is cool. So when you need to resize a window or, god forbid, drag it by its title bar(), that too is minimized into unrecognisability. To be clear, the problem here is, that you can't tell where window A ends and window B begins, because of design minimalism, so it is simply hard to discern where the drag-border is.
() which leads me to window title-bar anorexia: It has also become oh so popular to minimize and compact the windows title bar, so that there is no area left where your mouse can grab the window to drag it. Web browsers, among many other apps, are guilty of this. The intent behind is to avoid the "double windows top", where you have first the title bar, then the menu below that (they have been collapsed into one); but apparently no one thought about "but how can users then drag their windows?".. I guess we are not supposed to, because the app is supposed to be full-screen maxxed, on the tablet we are drooling on. Or if there is another way, I, director Skinner and Homer's dad did not get the memo.