I Want My Scrollbar Back (A 2-Minute Read)

One of my main activities every day is reading. I read fiction (often as physical books I've gone through a great pain to get.) I read tech docs. I read blog posts.

I'm deprived of my attention, though. So I usually can't read long-form posts, research papers, and non-fiction books. I skip pages or slip through them without realizing what the words say.

That's why I always want to know what kind of page I'm looking at. Is this a casual intro blog post? Is this a researchy long-read? Is this an industry report? I have to allocate my resources accordingly. Time and focus—I lack the latter, but often the former too.

While some authors/blogs/engines provide the "minutes to read" metric, most don't. So I have to rely on the omnipresent interface affordance: the scrollbar. When I see that the scrollbar takes one-fourth of the screen, I'm like "Okay, two minute read, I'll get to it right now!" When the scrollbar is a dot instead of a bar, well... I'm going to read it, but later, I guess?

But the scrollbar is dead. All too often I open a page, seeing a big scrollbar. Embrace the calmness of a short text ahead. And discover that the page is a long-ass read with chunks of content loading dynamically via JavaScript. I can no longer rely on the scrollbar because they broke it.

Please, get my scrollbar back. I can't read your writing without it.

Thank you.