Raymond Chen, longtime Microsoft employee and author of the very popular The Old New Thing blog, published an interesting post about the Win32 scrollbar. It turns out there’s actually quite a few interesting shortcuts and useful hidden features, like clicking inside a scrollbar while holding down shift will make the content jump to that point. Halfway through the article, though, Chen laments how nobody really uses proper Win32 scrollbars anymore.
Sadly, almost nobody uses Win32 scroll bars any more. Everybody uses frameworks that provide their own custom scroll bars.
↫ Raymond Chen
And as you might expect, none of these scrollbars work like the Win32 one, making even something as basic as the scrollbar a fragmented mess. He doesn’t just blame things like Electron, either, as Microsoft’s own WinUI framework, which is used for most “new” Windows UI developed by Microsoft for Windows 11, also uses custom scrollbars that do not work like the Win32 one does.
Great, so by the time I learn about a shortcut for scroll bars (Shift+click), the ecosystem has fragmented so much that I can’t even rely on it working.
↫ Raymond Chen
Modern computing is depressing.
I can’t believe after all these years I never knew about holding shift. That should really be the default behavior.
Generally speaking nobody ever did and nobody cares. Majority of people never did or ever will use modifiers for navigating scroll bar.
I agree with the author’s take on the decline of standard user interfaces. The author stopped short of blaming microsoft…he doesn’t want to bite the hand that feeds him. But microsoft went from being a genuine leader for UI standards to one of the worst enemies for standards. They ditched decades worth of UI optimizations and studies and gave the green light to utter trash. We made the sad transition from software UI standards being the norm to being the exception.
Not really. They took the UI they haven’t invented and made it default UI in Windows. They didn’t allow much customization of Windows UI and on top of that there was only one Windows. Until i guess there wasn’t only one Windows (version) any more and that already introduced some fragmentation. If lets say there would be only one GNU/Linux distribution and customizing wouldn’t be a thing, plus if majority of people would be using it and on top of that “new” version would only be released every decade, or so. It would be exactly the same thing. People would say first version, or two, when becoming really popular, where good at standards, after not so much. Reality hence is Microsoft was not really good at this, circumstances involved might have made it look like that for a while, in reality they are actually horrible at it. I guess just like the rest, AFAIK nobody is rally good at this in terms of mainstream solutions.
Geck,
While MS didn’t invent WIMP UIs, they genuinely did work to advance accessibility and standardization. Never the less I know you have a religious hatred for everything microsoft and I don’t really care if you don’t want to give them credit. MS went on to throw it all away anyway.