Re: Flipping for scrolled windows

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Steve Underwood <steveu coppice org> writes: 
> Not quite so much, maybe, but there is still substantial benefit in the
> left hand scroll bar. I think we only use right hand scroll bars because
> someone way back did it, nobody bothered with any ergonomic assessment,
> and now its written in tablets of stone that right hand bars are right.

I wouldn't be surprised if the MacOS people tested this. Nonetheless,
even if for a blank slate user left-side were better, we have to cope
with the fact that 95% of users are not blank-slate...

One important issue is that if we hide scrollbars when not necessary -
something I don't think NeXT or Mac do - then having them on the left
leads to your content area bouncing around in unpleasant ways.

Regardless of defaults, I think both a) whether to hide unused bars
and b) whether to put them on the nonstandard side would be reasonable
prefs to have, since they are trivial to implement.

Havoc