Why not just set "Always show scrollbars" in System Preferences if you don't like it that way?

Ah you're right, just yesterday I sprained my pinky hitting command-up and command-down!

You got me on that one!

You can always click on the scroll bars -- invisible doesn't mean they don't exist, they simply go out of the way when they're not needed (i.e. most of the time / when not scrolling). You can do that on iOS and Android as well, tap and hold on the scroll bar to quickly scroll through an entire document.

This is actually a non-issue (or at least a minor issue for extremely long pages) on a Mac, because macOS has system-wide kinetic scrolling and all Apple input devices use touch sensitive surfaces for scrolling.

Not saying you're wrong, it's certainly annoying on mobile devices (compounded by the narrow screens and responsive content).

Also part of a trend to add more “hover and wait” elements pointlessly:

- Can’t see scrollbar without hovering and waiting.

- Can’t see folder drag icon in window title without hovering and waiting.

- Can’t interact with notifications without hovering and waiting.

- Can’t see full menu of options on Full Screen window button without hovering and waiting.

Dear Apple: this is a fundamentally backwards design trend that creates major productivity hits. These were arbitrary changes that made things harder to use. In short: there was no “design” happening here, it was just “fiddling”.

> I have a really hard time believing anyone would chose this as opposed to some design lead at Apple pushing a weird personal preference for tidyness on their entire user base

I strongly prefer the invisible scroll bars in about 95% of cases.

I'm either using a trackpad or a scroll wheel on my trackball. In the former case, it's trivially easy to jog the screen up and down or sideways, to see if there's missing content. In the latter case, yeah, horizontal scrolling is challenging, but I'm going to be on a widescreen monitor, so my response is to fill more of the window with the content (quick shout-out to Moom, which makes this easy).

It very occasionally happens that I won't notice that there's more content available, and scroll bars would help with that. But I'd rather optimize for the usual case, and get the cleaner lines and extra real estate which go with it.

Need to is pretty strong. My company did UX testing on scroll bars and the overwhelming majority of our users on laptop scroll using the keyboard or the scroll wheel (which on laptop is done using two finger dragging). I forget the exact number but it was less than 10% of users actually interact with the scrollbar.

> Needless to say I failed, when I'm probably overqualified for the job, but heh...

Judging by the way you talk, I seriously doubt that.