Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don’t want you to scroll! “Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time.
They are bad replicas of school bars. Except you can’t use these to scroll the page and they use horizontal progress to express vertical progress. Everything they do could be done more effectively by having a visible scroll bar.
Unless they were copying it from somewhere else, what were their arguments to implement it? Is it about gamefication of reading an article?