The state of scrollbars in Windows makes even longtime Microsoft engineers sad

Raymond Chen, longtime Microsoft employee and author of the very popular The Old New Thing blog, published an interesting post about the Win32 scrollbar. It turns out there's actually quite a few interesting shortcuts and useful hidden features, like clicking inside a scrollbar while holding down shift will make the content jump to that point. Halfway through the article, though, Chen laments how nobody really uses proper Win32 scrollbars anymore.

Sadly, almost nobody uses Win32 scroll bars any more. Everybody uses frameworks that provide their own custom scroll bars.

Raymond Chen

And as you might expect, none of these scrollbars work like the Win32 one, making even something as basic as the scrollbar a fragmented mess. He doesn't just blame things like Electron, either, as Microsoft's own WinUI framework, which is used for most new" Windows UI developed by Microsoft for Windows 11, also uses custom scrollbars that do not work like the Win32 one does.

Great, so by the time I learn about a shortcut for scroll bars (Shift+click), the ecosystem has fragmented so much that I can't even rely on it working.

Raymond Chen

Modern computing is depressing.