Opera CTO: Kill the Browser Scroll Bar

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Opera CTO Hakon Wium Lei has proposed a new delivery system for the ‘printed word’ in browser systems. His proposal would give browsers the same look and navigational properties of e-readers, replacing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as the predominate mode of navigation. His proposal has both weight and merit, mainly due to the fact that he helped developed both systems.

"The page can have a much more beautiful presentation," Lie said. "The flipping of the page becomes an event. I think few people would sit and read 'Alice in Wonderland' with a scroll bar."
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You want web pages to be actual pages?

Web pages arent books and books arent web pages.

No thanks.
 
Sounds like a big step backward to me. I hate having to go through multiple pages to find what I want. It makes ctrl+f a lot less powerful as well.

I think scrolls went out of style because books are much more convenient to store in large quantities and find again using the spine. They also help you look up information by breaking it up into pages that you can jump to. That all becomes moot when there is no physical form to it and the addition of search functions.
 
So he want's to make all my webpages into slide shows? I bet people who sell ad space will love the extra hits.
 
This guy is their CTO?? No wonder they took a browser that was 10 years ahead of its time and ran it into the ground. They still don't have hardware accelerated graphics, lol.
 
What about people with tiny resolutions (laptops with less than 720 pixels in height) made for a person with this kind of resolution, then switching to 1440 vertical, one is going to fit poorly!

Anyway who hates scrollbars? You can make them invisible if you so wish...Probably scrolling through text is often better than flipping pages, as when you flip a page all the information on the page before is "lost" but with scrolling you have a constant feed you can look up at. You make your own "pages". Also ctrl+f.

I feel like making all webpages I make now horizontal scrolling :D
 
Yeah as much as I like innovation, I tend to stick to the old adage of "it it ain't broke, don't break it."
 
When I want to read an actual good book, I get it from my bookcase.

When I want to read tidbits of news, and forum discussions, and see how badly I'm getting beaten in fantasy football, I want a scroll bar.

No loss, though, since I don't use Opera anyway. And if this ridiculous idea gets implemented, there's another reason to stay away.
 
I'd maybe like the scroll bar optional.... or maybe even on the LEFT side instead of RIGHT (I bet there's an app for this)
 
That would be fantastic. Blogs, articles and forums like this one are a pain to read with the traditional scroll bar.
I waste quite a lot of time scrolling text, resizing windows or zooming web sites instead of spending all that time reading the page.
And the text or pictures cut in half are really killing the reading experience.
Depending on the design, you should still be able to search the whole cached text, not just the specific page displayed. Very long pages, like whole books, may need a different handling.
Most of the sites or even ebooks like PDFs use a fixed width for display, instead of letting the text and graphics flow on the user's device or window size.
Many news sites already split long articles in several pages. This always seemed random to me (like, why 3 pages and not 2 or 4), and they usually combine scrolling long pages and splitting several pages, which hardly seems ideal.
Browsers are not so great for distance viewing either, like 1-5 meters, so there are probably still improvements to be made.

This kind of technology (and you don't have to use it if you don't like it) could also give rise to other possibilities. For instance, sometimes I want to send a link to an article, and even to a specific text in the article. The link could very well include the text to highlight, and display the page containing that text based on the recipient's browser window size. It might be page 2 on my desktop, but it could be formatted as page 6 on my friend's device.
 
There are so many stupid rules and junk that go along with publishing because of the page mentality. They have rules about how big images can be, they have images which often are stuck in places that do not make sense because of the efficiency of space use. Web pages removed all those problems and many groups such as scientists are just now starting to figure out they can start removing stupid rules from publishing since almost no one bothers with hard copies any more.

I am not saying he has no point what so ever but that is up to each website to implement on their own. I already find it very annoying that most web sites seem to assume that people are running an 800x600 monitor when that only exists on phones now days. Scrolling gives us alot of options to view what we want in a single screen and allows websites to be flexible if the need to scroll horizontal they can vertical they can.

I think if a browser wants to do something like this it should be a user pref and browser based. I was hoping is was going to say we dont need the the scroll bars anymore I think everyone knows how to use a mouse wheel. Scroll bars could autohide IMO.
 
What about screens with different resolutions? Not all monitors are created equal...
Is scaling the only choice then? That would look ugly at the wrong resolution!
 
Sounds good to me..the quicker Opera kills itself off and I don't have to listen at them complain about MS being anti-competitive as being their reason for not having more market share instead of realizing that their browser just sucks, the better.

What a stupid idea.
 
It's actually not that bad of an implementation, if you try the demo. It doesn't reload the page for the other pages, it essentially makes a horizontal scroll function while keeping the header and sidebar on the screen. Their wikipedia demo shows how it can apply to a current site.
 
Greene420 said:
I'd maybe like the scroll bar optional.... or maybe even on the LEFT side instead of RIGHT (I bet there's an app for this)
Click to expand...

Theres already html/CSS for that I seem to remember...using rtl usually puts the scrollbar on the other side (the rest of the document can be realigned ltr again to make the paragrahs align properly).
 
ferrisnox said:
This guy is their CTO?? No wonder they took a browser that was 10 years ahead of its time and ran it into the ground. They still don't have hardware accelerated graphics, lol.
Click to expand...

Opera's software rendering is still much faster than other's "hardware accelerated". Just using the GPU doesn't automatically make things faster, and afaik no browser actually has HW accelerated rendering of pages themselves. Things like Chrome and IE9 have GPU *compositing*, but not GPU *rendering*. GPU compositing only benefits sites with HTML5 canvas elements or CSS3 3d transformers - which very few do.

Open up Opera and <insert favorite browser here>. Go to any random page (like, say, hardocp.com ;) ), and use the scrollbar to slowly scroll down the page. Opera will crush face in smoothness because it is simply faster at drawing. I have no idea how they are so fast, but they are scary quick.

That said, I'm willing to at least hear the guy out unlike most of you. It doesn't seem like he is proposing multiple page hits, just a way to specify to the browser how to page horizontally instead of scrolling vertically. For things like tablets and phones this could actually be really, really useful. Which, surprise surprise, is what he was demoing on.
 
Greene420 said:
I'd maybe like the scroll bar optional.... or maybe even on the LEFT side instead of RIGHT (I bet there's an app for this)
Click to expand...

In Opera, you can disable the scrollbars via "Ctrl + F12 -&gt; Advanced -&gt; Browser".

For Right-to-left pages, the scrollbar automatically switches to the the left side. But, you can disable that by going to "opera:config#RTL%20Flips%20UI".
 
ferrisnox said:
This guy is their CTO?? No wonder they took a browser that was 10 years ahead of its time and ran it into the ground. They still don't have hardware accelerated graphics, lol.
Click to expand...

In the latest 12.00 snapshot, Opera supports Hardware acceleration and WebGL. HWA is only done with OpenGL so far, but DirectX (on WinXP even) will also be supported. The acceleration is still a little buggy and needs optimization, but they're working on it.

Further, Opera's HWA will accelerate the whole browser, unlike other browsers.

To turn off hwa and webgl, goto "opera:config#Enable%20Hardware%20Acceleration" and "opera:config#Enable%20WebGL". 0 disables and 2 tries to force it if your driver/gpu is on the blacklist (because they're buggy for example).

These builds also have the HTML5 parser and ECMAScript 5.1 support. XHR2 support is coming soon.

The builds at http://labs.opera.com/news/2011/10/19/ support getUserMedia() for use with your webcam.

They keep on improving the built-in mail client too.

Opera has also been experimenting with automatically reparsing broken XML as HTML (required because many sites use some old asp.net browser sniffing stuff that serves HTML as application/xhtml+xml to Opera but text/html to others.

In short, Opera's been putting in some serious work.
 
MajorDomo said:
Opera CTO Hakon Wium Lei has proposed a new delivery system for the ‘printed word’ in browser systems. His proposal would give browsers the same look and navigational properties of e-readers, replacing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as the predominate mode of navigation. His proposal has both weight and merit, mainly due to the fact that he helped developed both systems.
Click to expand...

But note that it doesn't replace CSS. It uses some new stuff in CSS (in a way that can still be parsed by current CSS parsers, Support for the new types just needs to be added as far as parsing goes.)

I've tried the build at < http://labs.opera.com/news/2011/10/19/ >. It's pretty cool. You can use gesture left/right or left/right arrow keys to flip pages. It's definitely appealing for certain kinds of content.
 
kuyaglen said:
But what about my Logitech G500 and its awesome hyper-scrollwheel! :mad:
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Does something about it not work in Opera?

Alps/Synaptic Drivers at least have behavior lists where they specify how each program should behave. The problem is, they often specify the wrong behavior for some programs like Opera. This can cause the mouse to fire the wrong events and therefore break some mouse features in Opera. The same thing might happen for logitech drivers too.
 
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