We don’t need no stinkin’ scrollbar buttons

Isn’t it funny? I can still remember the days, when people argued about the placement of the scrollbar buttons (which are not that far away actually). You know, those small buttons with arrows, sometimes at both sides of a scrollbar, sometimes only at one side, depending on the UI you’re working with. Especially in the UI modding scene (aka. themers) there was a common comment: “I don’t like where you put your scrollbar buttons” (I think it was a solid second to “I don’t like where your window buttons are” — another “worthwhile” debate that fortunately was brought back by Ubuntu recently).

But now I start to see those buttons disappear. We can thank all those fancy touch UIs, where touch scroll makes the buttons useless. But also more and more desktop apps (or web apps to be used with desktop browsers) are starting to ditch the buttons. If you want an example, look at Tweetie for Mac. Now I stumbled across some apps in private beta which also come with button-free scrollbars.

Thinking about it, it makes sense. Multitouch-Pads are nowadays in almost every laptop. There is no mouse I can think of without scroll-wheel (or -ball or -pad). The buttons are too small to hit anyway. Most people who do interact with the scrollbar directly, move the indicator around instead of clicking the buttons.

Now the questions remain: are the designers/programmers getting rid of those buttons, because they are not needed anymore or because it’s just fancy? A bit of both? Are the buttons really useless nowadays because the indicator is actually enough?

Now, if we could just stop the debate over window buttons in a similar way…