GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 462723
Scrollbars draw too much the attention
Last modified: 2008-02-02 23:27:58 UTC
The new clearlooks is nice (I love the tabs!). But it feels to me like the scrollbars are too visible: the blue is too "bright" and when you look at a window, it's probably the first thing you see, which seems wrong to me.
Perhaps they could be colored on mouseover only (like the checkboxes currently are (oh, and menu items for that matter) ).
Note that a earlier version of Clearlooks had colored scrollbars as well [1], but that was later removed because they were found too distracting. 1. http://www.stellingwerff.com/cl-cairo/wip15.png
The scrollbar is now not colorized in the default Clearlooks theme. (The change is in gtk-engines.) I'll do a gtk-engines release (and notify appropriate lists) later today.
I will talk better with andreasn, I've the idea of having a theme with two main colors, one is bg_selected and one a lighter bg_selected. So we could use the lighter on the scrollbar and maybe in other widgets. And as reported to benzea: "I remember 2 things: 1) clearlooks cairo have a BIG difference between widgets and scrollbars the scrollbars in clearlooks cairo used a very differend colorization than the default one so THAT was giving the feeling of a different widgets if you remember in cairo the scrollbars have a glossy look while all the theme has a flat gradient. in gummy scrollbars and the rest of the widgets have exactly the same style 2) remember that the idea of colorizing the scrollbar is not new to the world, see OSX for example and windows xp too"
Adding the usability people to the CC list. About 1. I don't see how the scrollbar is much different than the rest in eg. gtk-engines 2.10/GNOME 2.18. Both the button and the scrollbar has a gradient. 2. At the same time they use the blue more widgets in the overall design. OSX for default buttons and comboboxes I think. XP for the scrollbar and spinbutton steppers, and also comboboxes. So the blue areas, and standing out controls, are more prominent in those themes in general.
1. that's why you are using a non-colored scrollbar. If you set a colored one the glossy effect will appear: glossy! http://www.stellingwerff.com/cl-cairo/wip16.png 2. we are colorizing almost all widgets if you don't think of buttons.
I'm closing that bug, since no one in the last months suffered for that and commented there. Polishing bugzilla :)