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How to un-tiny scrollbars in Firefox
(snee.la)
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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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With mouse wheels and touch screens everywhere, I can't even remember the last time I wanted to drag a scroll bar. Even worse, I have faint memories of infinitely scrolling websites that just hated it when you dragged the scroll bar. What do you need that interaction for? I'm not judging, I'm just curious about the use case.
I seldom care to manually interact with it, but by god do I hate when it's so narrow, low-contrast, and auto-hiding as to be virtually invisible (and I'm not even visually impaired!).
I want to know where I am, and how long the document is. Why are modern GUIs trying so hard to hide this information from me while pretending they aren't, like a child stubbornly avoiding eye contact when the teacher asks a question?
Not OP but here's one use case. I use FF as a PDF reader, it's faster than Nitro and Adobe opening files and searching within. When I have a 600+ page Admin Guide open scrolling is prohibitive. When I do a text search FF puts location indicators in the scroll bar. A larger scrollbar is better visually and easier to interact with.
Also, what kind of psycho uses a touch screen on a desktop computer?
I use my pc with a “touchscreen” via VNC about 75% of the time.
Tiny scroll bars can suck it.
In that case you set the system to show them bigger, which should affect all apps.
In fact I just tested this, and if I set Windows 11 to "always show scroll bars" (which matches your use case), Firefox immediately goes to full-size scrollbar mode.
I use a Wacom tablet in place of a mouse (for work, and because I get serious arm pain after about ~30mn of using a mouse) and while it has a "touch ring", it requires me to let go of the stylus and it's not very sensitive at all, making for a poor replacement of a mouse wheel. Some time ago I got myself a macropad with big rotary knobs and they do the job, but for years I relied on scrollbars.
I use the scroll bar at home mostly because the scroll wheel on my mouse is finicky. If I don't scroll just right it'll scroll down a little before scrolling right back up or just not scroll down at all. So it's more convenient for me to just use the scroll bar.