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Computer scrollbars: Why is Apple eradicating a linchpin of user interface design? - Slate Magazine
Notes
I can understand the impulse here: Most scrollbars are kind of ugly. Even the skinny, rounded gray bar that Apple invented for the iPhone isn’t the prettiest interface element ever designed. But as unpleasant as they may be to look at, scrollbars serve a purpose on a busy screen: They tell you, at a glance, where you are in a list or a document. Because most modern scrollbars are proportional to the size of the document you’re looking at, they also give you a sense of how much lies off-screen—the smaller the scrollbar, the larger the document. And when you don’t see a scrollbar—or when the scrollbar is dimmed—this usually means there’s nothing outside the screen to look at.
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