I used to like MacOS's subtler than Windows approach to scrollbars, but they became too subtle. They were lovely in Snow Leopard: Gently aqua coloured, arrows, large enough for middle aged (or overworked, and in a hurry) eyes. Obvious.
Then they went to Lion and ruined them: grey and almost invisible by design. Magical mystery popping into existence when you hover where it ought to be. Probably. I think this is when they inverted the magic mouse scroll behaviour to pretend like your iMac was an iPhone.
I've had the setting flipped to always show them since they added that nonsense. It looks a bit more subtle, and isn't brightly colored, but it serves the important role of showing at a glance how long the page is.
The backwards scrolling is way more obnoxious though, and I rage every time I use someone else's Mac or do a fresh install.
Aye, me too. Though I prefer when they were a little more obvious - now they're a background visual indicator, and essentially deprecated as a control, for being too narrow.
Most of the times I encounter backward scrolling on someone else's Mac, it's only there because they never realised Settings let you invert it to sane and useful!
The “backward” scrolling (a better name might be “content scrolling” as compared to “window scrolling”) was changed because the “forward” way does not work for scrolling content on a multi-touch display. If the content moves in the opposite direction from the finger, it completely breaks the illusion that the fingers are directly controlling the content.
People switching back and forth between Macs and iPhones or iPads initially found it very inconvenient/frustrating to have window scrolling on a touchpad and content scrolling on a touchscreen.
It was decided that switching the Mac to be consistent with iOS would cause momentary frustration for Mac users (it requires a few days of retraining to get used to) but would be less frustrating for most users than preserving two inconsistent behaviors into perpetuity.
The option to keep the Mac on window scrolling was included to mollify those few Mac users unwilling to spend a few days or weeks re-training themselves to a reversed gesture.
The problem is that my mental model for scrolling on a touchpad is different than scrolling on a phone/tablet. My finger isn't touching the content, it's touching a scroll device. It never stops feeling backwards to use a touchpad and have the scroll go backwards.
On a macbook with a big touchpad it sure as heck feels like touching the content. Esp. with fluid gestures (not abrupt like windows) and pinching it feels very physical. And then flicking with two fingers and the inertia of the page that keeps on scrolling because you pushed it very hard feels satisfying. On windows it just feels fake.
Anecdotally, several people I have talked to about this had no problem with the new behavior (after a relatively short re-training time), but did find switching between touchcreens and touchpads with opposite behaviors frustrating.
If you do have a problem, then you can switch it in System Preferences. Everyone wins.
The biggest problem, in my opinion, is that there appear to be two settings, one for trackpad, and one for a mouse scrollwheel. You can find them in different locations. They change the same value, though. You can't have natural trackpad scrolling and "pull the wheel towards you to scroll down" scrolling at the same time without a 3rd-party application.
> they inverted the magic mouse scroll behaviour to pretend like your iMac was an iPhone.
These are UI/UX conventions. Everything is "pretend".
For example, users whose mental model of scrolling tracks the viewport will want to scroll up to move the content down. The viewport goes in the opposite direction of the content.
Fair enough.
However such users don't seem to want the same for horizontal scrolling. Tracking the viewport left moves the content to the right and vice versa. But horizontal scrolling in macOS always tracks the content regardless of the setting in System Preferences > Trakcpad > Scroll direction: Natural.
The exception (turning it off for "inverted" scrolling or "viewport tracking") is only for vertical scrolling, not horizontal, which suggests the mental model can be adapted though users who prefer viewport tracking report they cannot adjust.
Sure, perhaps if I had known nothing else... Except it's not a convention any other platform ever followed.
Of the few people I've bumped into who had it set to natural, and had for some considerable time, well even those were happy to learn it could be changed, and didn't want to go back. So there's probably something makes it feel odd, and stay feeling odd, for many. What I couldn't say, but not just restricted to those who spent time on other platforms too, like me. Of people whose machines I get to use from time to time at work, they're all set to unnatural too. We're nearly all iPhone users. So it's not just me being odd and rare edge case. :)
Personally, I don't want the same mental model between phone and desktop, as the metaphors are different. UI should look different, act different, suited to using each device. The Win 8 on, Lion on desire to make my laptop "feel" more like a mobile, continues to feel like a huge mistake.
Then they went to Lion and ruined them: grey and almost invisible by design. Magical mystery popping into existence when you hover where it ought to be. Probably. I think this is when they inverted the magic mouse scroll behaviour to pretend like your iMac was an iPhone.