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December 22, 2009
Mac Scrollbars: Making Sense of the Senseless
I'm trying to figure out why the scrollbars on Wendy's Mac behave the way they do. It makes me want to kill myself. When you click on a vertical scrollbar, it jumps all the way down to where you click, instead of going down a page at a time. Maddening. This post seems to describe what I'm experiencing:
"As for the scrolling, the convention for "paging" with scrollbars is to click the "track" for the slider. Apple undermines this convention because now how much you scroll depends on where you click. I recall MS IE had this once (I don't know if it was an intended feature or a bug, but it quietly appeared then disappeared around Version 6). I drove me crazy. You couldn't just position your pointer at the bottom of the track and click-click to page-page. You had to guess about how far to move the pointer each time. I would miss content and not know it."
These people seem to be describing a similar problem in Firefox on a Mac.
For the record, her Mac is running OS X 10.5 (Leopard), though I'm not clear if this matters. Half the articles I read are about Mac trying master the complexities of the two-button mouse, or, heaven forbid, a mouse with a scroll-wheel. These mouse features have been available under Windows for eons, but Apple Inc. has only recently begun to try to implement them. So maybe I'm asking too much here.
Posted by Rob Kiser on December 22, 2009 at 11:35 PM
Comments
It's quite easy: System Preferences>Appearance>Click in the scroll bar to...
You have the option to scroll directly to the point in the document that corresponds to your click, or to scroll a page at a time.
Macs have natively supported scroll wheels and multiple mouse buttons since OS X's release almost a decade a go. It's not a new thing, we're quite used to it.
Posted by: DrChandra on December 26, 2009 at 1:54 PM