Who Killed the Scrollbar?

While I'm feeling ranty: who killed the scrollbar?

It's not so bad on desktops, and I can restore it there anyway via CSS.

But on Mobile, it seems the hip hawt coolness for today's kids is to either completely disappear, or make only occasionally visible, the scrollbar.

Lord knows, you can't actually grab the scrollbar and navigate with the bloody thing.

Problem is: with long articles (I'm reading on of@cstross's blog posts, and the inevitable War and Peace length comments section) leave you with:

1. No flipping clue how long the flipping post flipping is.
2. No flipping way to quickly navigate to the top or bottom of the post.

That last is with a (really miserable, utterly unsuitable, totally disrecommended) Logitech Bluetooth keyboard. Which utterly flipping lacks flipping page-up, page-down, home, and end keys.

You know: for rapidly getting around a document.

Pocket is another service that effs this up. Here, we get a scrollbar, but it's a skinny, scrawny-ass, emaciated, anaemic, pale pasty little twit, that disappears as soon as you flipping look at it. Mind that Pocket is supposed to be a flipping tool for flipping reading flipping stuff, and flipping helping you with that.

(Pocket gets a number of other things right.

It's a decent tool, and I'm happy to have it. Though I'm increasingly disappointed with it over time

But it sure as shootin' can use a few shots in the arm, or ass, to fill in some weaknesses.)

Doing one whole hell of a flipping lot of flipping reading these flipping days, both hardcopy and online, I can tell you that the whole flipping idea of knowing how much more flipping material there flipping is to read is one of the really flipping nice affordances of this funky Egyptian-Chinese-German hybrid technology people worked out. It's called a book .

But no, take a tablet, add keyboard, give it a 9-10 inch (~20 cm) screen, and take away every last flipping goddamned means developed over 45 years of graphical user interface design for flipping telling where you are in a document and efficiently going elsewhere .

This. Is. Not. Progress.

I swear heads have to roll. Literally.

There's a viewport width at which scrollbars -- real flipping grabbable scrollbars -- make flipping sense. I'm not convinced there's one at which they don't.

(Oh, hey,@ello,@wtf, since I totally y'all, before I come around with my portable Gil-u-Teen and Revolutionary Carnival, y'all might wanna see about fixing scrollbars on Ello as well.)

(Note: the word "flipping", and cognates, in this document was originally similar, but some of the letters were different.)