but you can't interact with them except by bringing the mouse over the right side, and you can't see them so you literally have lost a visual cue of the very thing you want to interact with. It's just amazing.
Yes, but the fact that so few people actually complains probably tells you a lot about the input devices that people use.
Touchpads with two finger scroll and mouse with scroll wheels have turned scrolling into a gesture that doesn't necessarily require UI element, in pretty much the same way that a physical keyboard is just there for you to type on and doesn't pop up in existence when you have a focused input field
But this is partially missing the original point about proportional scrollbars, which is that they illustrate how large the scrollable content is at a glance. With hidden scrollbars or, as I believe you're describing, simply not even looking at the scrollbar, there's no indication of where you are in the content or how large the content is. I would argue this is one of the chief grievances I have when consuming content on a mobile device (among an armada of other grievances with mobile consumption, at least on the web).
Those of us who like knowing contextual information such as document size at a glance are sad to see (proportional) scrollbars go.
> Yes, but the fact that so few people actually complains ...
I'm curious where you're getting your numbers for that claim.
In Microsoft Word, f.e, there's a lot of questions around how to disable the auto-hiding, and I believe the only remedy is to disable auto-hiding of all scrollbars within Windows 10 itself (it's under the accessibility setting hierarchy, weirdly).
There's myriad native & web applications that choose to hide these, and they're an endless source of frustration for people that would like them present, but find they are not, and subsequently find there's no convenient way to disable the auto-hide, and then lose interest in filing yet another bug / feature request.
Few people complain about them because there are so many new-to-computers users who don't have enough experience to appreciate the value of default-visible, proportionally-sized scrollbar thumbs. We're in some kind of awful eternal-September of user interfaces world where experienced users get to suffer through new developers, eager to leave their mark by making "modern" user interfaces re-learn all the old lessons.
my anecdata: when my family members complain about confusing things with computers the question "how do I know if there are more things down the page" is rarely the problem.
By far the most frequent issue is "where did that file I just saved go?" followed by "how do I forward this and that together?" and "it doesn't work! I didn't do anything. Yes, it asked me something and I clicked something but I don't remember, but I didn't do anything"
I complained to MS about a serious performance issue. Even finding out how took time. Nothing happened. I reported it slightly differently. Nothing happened. I spent several hours overall, all completely ignored. I no longer consider bug reports to MS to be worth anything.
I think you're right about the touchpad, it's my understanding they removed scrollbar visibility because of that input style, however ATM I'm using windows and and I have a trackball with a scroll wheel and I very regularly look at the scrollbars when I'm doing C#, or looking at browsing in palemoon, my two main activities. It tells me where I am (heavily looked at in vis stdio), which us part of the reason some people (not me) like minimaps.
but you can't interact with them except by bringing the mouse over the right side, and you can't see them so you literally have lost a visual cue of the very thing you want to interact with. It's just amazing.