Steam client vertical scrollbar usability

[ash]

The vertical scroll bar usability is just awful.

Firstly, what is this ridiculous obsession with slimline scrollbars? It makes it stupidly more fiddly to place the mouse in just the right spot (more on this below).

On some screens it is permanently narrow, on others it's narrow until mouse over when it visually widens, both are just awful. I'm only on 2560x1440, I can only imagine how tiny it would be on 4k.
The vertical scrollbar simply needs to be wider and maintain a consistent (device independent) width regardless of monitor resolution, at all times, no shrinking when mouse is not over.

Secondly when I quickly move my mouse to the right edge of the screen as far as it can go, I should then simply be able to click and scroll.

Not with your scrollbar though! I have to carefully move the pointer back a couple of pixels until I'm actually over the scrollbar.

STOP DOING THIS! This has been standard good UI design for decades, most applications don't find this too hard, not Steam.

Have your UI people never heard of "The Rule of the infinite edges” and Fitt's law? If not fire them and get some competent people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law

EDIT: Ignore all stupidly obfuscating formulas in that article, the third paragraph in "Implications for UI design" is all you need to know, i.e "The Rule of the infinite edges”

(Yes I have a mouse wheel and PgUp / PgDown, Home / End keys.
When I am on a reviews or discussions screen it is by far the quickest and simplest for me to use the vertical scrollbar.)

[Jonius7]

So, the scrollbar for the library and friends chat is different to the one you might find on the discussion and store pages.

It is changeable, through some CSS, though I am not looking into it at the moment. I know most of the classes that control the appearance of the scrollbar are named something_throbber

[ash]

Yeah I had a look at changing the CSS a couple of years ago, it seemed to overwrite my changes when steam updated. This was for trying to change the text size in reviews though, so I may look again for that class name to at least try improving it.

The problem is that I don't think there is a "user_style.css" or similar, so any changes are unsupported and will just be lost again on updates. In other words Valve don't really want us changing styles in the client even to improve accessibility and usability.

[Jonius7]

About the overwriting issue, one way is to use SteamFriendsPatcher

I have a GitHub and video guide here on how to edit the Steam Library:
https://github.com/Jonius7/SteamUI-OldGlory

[Flav]

BUUUUMMMPPP. Is this rocket science? Come on.

[Clement]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.