Mac OS X Lion, scrollbars, and website usability

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I have a number of overflowed divs that I use to display a lot of content in small space (like long lists, etc). Giving the divs the CSS rule of overflow: auto; always worked like a charm, giving the user scroll bars to indicate more content was available.

This is kinda thrown out the window with Mac OS X Lion, which (as a default) hides the scroll bars unless you're actively scrolling. I like it when dealing with an application on my computer, because I think there are very strong visual clues that you can scroll to see more content. On webpage elements, it's a lot less clear, and I'm worried that my users won't know there's more content available (case in point: StackOverflow's "Questions with similar titles" when entering in a new question is a good example of this).

Is this a legitimate concern, or will Lion users know that if something appears to be cut off, it indicates that scrolling might be available? Are there any workarounds to, say, force browsers running on Lion to render scroll bars if it's an element on the page (and not the page itself)??

6 Answers

OS X Lion is really just forcing the issue. Users of mobile browsers (both iOS and Andriod) have been bitching about this for ages ... the overflow trick does not work in general; you need to think harder about page design or look beyond standard browser behaviour and add javascript support for touch and scrolling (e.g. jqTouch).

Unfortunately, Lion's scrollbar behaviour doesn't just affect web sites. For example, it makes my vnc sessions to machines with large display settings pretty annoying (have to resize the vnc window to convince Lion to show me a scrollbar).

Doubly unfortunately, the solution is to go to "Preferences > General > Show scrollbars:" and set to "always". Kind of undoes any forward momentum that Apple may have been trying to build with Lion. But being able to actually use the damn thing is a general purpose trump card..

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