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0 pointsDiggsey3y ago0 comments

Tell that to the FE devs who add `overflow: scroll` everywhere and don't spot the problem...

0 comments

God yes, I hate how all FEs have tunnel vision on MacOS nowadays. Our sign-up flow had godawful scrollbars both horizontally and vertically for the longest time but they didn't notice because they're all on retina display Macbooks instead of what the bulk of our users will be using.

mmis10003y ago

Macos do have a option to always show scrollbar. And I think this is a pre-requirement to enable that if you ever care about what your user may actually see as a FE.

Besides that, there isn't actually obvious different between firefox/chrome/edge on macos/windows.

The most problematic one is actually safari(which is on mac only). If you dev on chrome and use on firefox or vise versus. You usually get a "mostly work with minor visual different". But safari… will give you a fail and are't even usable. It is outright the modern age ie.

patrakov3y ago

In the past, I was able to reproduce a supposedly Safari-only issue using Epiphany on Linux. This browser uses a closely-related engine.

wildmanx3y ago

A solution is to have somebody in each FE team with a "that's what the masses use" device. Screen-wise, CPU-wise, RAM-wise, network b/w wise. And let them use it as a primary dev device.

Doesn't sound sexy, no. Compensate them royaly. And make clear that they are superstars just by having this work environment. Then keep listening to what annoys them with whatever you are building, and let them fix it.

jchw3y ago

I agree with this nitpick. Unfortunately, I think we are losing that battle, because more platforms are adopting the hidden scrollbar (anti-)pattern.

That, however, is bound to happen even if you have Windows workstations. It happened at a job where I was, in fact, running Windows, because the designer ran macOS and was oblivious to this issue. (Of course, I would fix it when spotted. But it still managed to make it out to prod at times.)

Wowfunhappy3y ago

What's especially nuts about this to me is that macOS supports static scrollbars! System Preferences → General → Show Scroll Bars → Always.

Or, leave the default settings in place, but plug in a mouse with a physical scroll wheel.

So it's not even that they're only using one platform, but they're only testing the platform with default settings with the default hardware. And we're not even talking about an obscure setting buried three levels deep, it's right there in the general pane!

dreamcompiler3y ago

Or on the command line:

  sudo defaults write -g AppleShowScrollBars -string Always

I include this as part of my setup script for any new Mac.

azangru3y ago

This can be fixed by toggling a single MacOS setting to make the scrollbars always visible so that FE devs can feel the pain they are causing to their non-Mac using customers. Can be included into onboarding process. No need for a real windows machine just on that account.

Jcampuzano23y ago

This is one of the first things I always turn on with a new Mac. And I always encourage everyone on my teams to turn this on because otherwise it goes completely unnoticed until we get that huge surge of issues and product being angry because Windows users complain about it.

But I also place the blame on design teams. Most design teams I've worked with also doesn't account for this in anything they create. They usually only design for: 1: the latest macbook pro; and 2: the latest iPhone.

hbn3y ago

I think YouTube comments have a bug like this right now. On Windows I frequently see a giant horizontal scrollbar across some comments that doesn't even move, or moves very little.

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