Once again I have to give firefox credit for giving users the tools in about:config to disable this. It's cute fluff at best and annoying/abusive at worst.
The browser's UI should more or less be fully off the table when it comes to what a website can change, and that includes scrollbars.
And on the flip side, Chrome - just had the biggest laugh when I got to this point:
"Imagine being able to configure anything useful in chrome ever."
Overall, a very well written article - kudos to the author.
(I've made the switch to FF again myself after Edge just got too annoying with their constant nagging about Bing search and other features. And the prompt to restore tabs. Just STFU and stop it already.)
Could you explain this point to me? I just checked and out of those two, it was _Firefox_ that has tiny, barely visible, vanishing scroll bars and _Chrome_ that has thick, well-visible, persistent ones. (And no, I didn't configure that on either)
The only thing that IMHO needs improvement in Chrome scroll bars is that the knob is light grey on lighter grey.
One useful thing you can enable in Chrome is tab bar scrolling. Without this setting the tab bar is broken by default, if you open too many tabs on it the bar will simply not show some of them because there's no room left, while all remaining ones are just a few pixels wide.
> The browser's UI should more or less be fully off the table when it comes to what a website can change, and that includes scrollbars.
I have a very strong recollection of adamantly defending IE6's ability to style scroll bars on forums in the early 2000s, whereas the Mozilla crowd at the time called it an abomination.
As an older man with both the power of hindsight and the weakness of failing sight, I can admit I was wrong. It's far too apt to abuse
If it were restricted just to style abominations, that would be one thing. It's the sites — and the libraries — that hijack the native behaviour, changing the speed / acceleration / easing of the scroll that are the really bad offenders.
It's not just your eyes, we were using very different screen resolutions back then and UI was lot clunkier looking too. Having the option is nice, but being able to disable that is critical
Let's include smooth scrolling in that list, too (whether scrolling with the mouse wheel or moving between words I Ctrl-F for on the page). Thankfully you can override this with uBlock Origin.
Also, kudos for the extended family of extension writers. The article author ends on praise for minimap sidebars as an upgrade over conventional scrollbars, and what do you know, there's something for that:
The problem with about:config options is that Mozilla sometimes decides to remove them (based on telemetry numbers perhaps). The usual path for an unpopular option seems to be GUI -> about:config -> The Void.
about:config options are workarounds, not solutions. This is for two reasons: first, they can change or vanish at any time, as you point out. Second, they're not very discoverable. You generally have to be told about them to know they're there.
Does the suggestion in the article not work? There are few options in about:config for scrollbars so I'd look at the others too. If that doesn't work I'd bet https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ has a solution.
That is confusing... I'm not sure what the unit of measurement there even is. Something like pixels would be nice, but that can't be it with a default of 1!
about:config is invaluable, but better documentation on the options would really be nice.
Not to mention it is the only program I ever used which lets you directly rearrange the UI. Three clicks and you can reorder or remove buttons, margins etc, we need something like that in every program including a color chooser for every element.
The browser's UI should more or less be fully off the table when it comes to what a website can change, and that includes scrollbars.