What happened to the scroll bar?
Short version: show the scroll bar while scrolling, hide it while static.
Long rant: why did you remove the scroll bar?
I know physical scrolling is trendy and all, but that's no reason to get rid of the functionality provided by the scrollbar. There are two really important functions that are not available with inertial dragging: - "random access", i.e. arbitrary absolute positioning at any point (useful on long pages, where scrolling takes a lot of time and user effort). - showing how long the document is, and how much of it remains unseen. This is a killer feature that permits sense making of navigation in digital documents - removing it is insane.
I know you're worried about screen real state in mobile Firefox, so I suggest a solution that recovers the missing functions while not wasting real state:
- Show a (traslucent?) scroll bar while the page is being scrolled with inertial scrolling.
It shows the scrollbar when it's most needed (while scrolling), and hides it when it's not (reading). If the scrollbar is pressed or interacted with, then it should remain visible even when static, available to further interaction, and it would hide when clicking outside of it.
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I agree with the above. Having a sense of where one is at in a long document is paramount. It's like turning off the lights in a middle of a room without it.
Also, having the scroll bar gives me complete control of how fast or slow I move up or down the page. Click on the endpoints and I move at a moderate rate of speed up and down; click in the scroll bar track and it moves faster, or grab the scroll cursor and slam it whichever direction I want.
I like the idea of a "hiding when not needed" scroll bar with translucent properties. but please, give them back! The scroll wheel on a mouse just isn't a substitute.
Scroll indicators are one of the planned features in Firefox for Maemo 1.1. We actually had them working in some of the 1.1 alpha builds, but we took them out temporarily because they were causing Firefox to slow down.
We're still working on this feature, and we will re-enable scroll indicators once we've fixed the performance. For more information, see: