Black scroll bars

[Dr PR]

On my laptop the scroll bars at the right side of the screen are black and the slider and up/down buttons are dark gray - almost always nearly invisible against the black background.

 

Aside from being an asinine choice and extremely user hostile, this choice of colors makes it much more difficult to control  the movement of screen content up and down.

 

I have tried to eliminate this problem with the windows setup option - and other web pages don't have this problem, so I am guessing it was a deliberate choice of the person who designed the web pages.

 

Is there some way that we can defeat this extremely irritating color scheme and just get the web page to use the Windows default color scheme for the scroll bar?

[mtaylor]

Phil, go to the bottom left of the page and you'll see IPS Themes.   Open and try different themes.  I'm not sure if background has anything to do with this.   So if the themes don't fix it, try changing your background and settings.  Do provide us with more info such as your operating system.

[James H]

16 hours ago, Dr PR said:

...Aside from being an asinine choice and extremely user hostile, this choice of colors makes it much more difficult to control  the movement of screen content up and down.

 

...Is there some way that we can defeat this extremely irritating color scheme and just get the web page to use the Windows default color scheme for the scroll bar?

 

Could be a theme thing, but no, we don't go out of our way to make things difficult for you.

 

It could be the way your own browser interprets our theme too. There are no colours or settings that we have ever changed that alter the colour of the scroll bar. Period.

 

Also remember, Windows is the system you operate. For others, like me, it's MacOS. There are no specifics for changing stuff like this to some Microsoft standard.

 

Try MSW on a different browser, just to see if it looks different. Either way, we can't change what you experience on your computer with your system/installed software. 

 

I don't also take too well to people calling any choices perhaps made as 'asinine'. Perhaps your rhetoric needs changing instead of a scroll bar colour.

[chris watton]

I am on a laptop now, Windows 10 using bog standard Microsoft Edge for the browser. No problems here.

[DelF]

4 minutes ago, chris watton said:

No problems here.

Nor here - Windows 10 & Chrome. 

 

[James H]

On my Mac. Both themes. Check the colour.

 

 

[Dr PR]

Mark,

 

Thanks! I looked at the different "themes" and the  "Illuminate 4.6" does not have this problem. It has a white background with a gray scroll bar.

 

However, I do not see how to change this theme for my account. It looks like ipsfocus wants me to pay $30.00 for the theme (for use in new web pages)! But I have created several web pages and the user cannot change the themes (it is part of the HTML/XHTML/CSS code).

 

****

 

I am running Windows 10 Home (latest update 9 November 2021) on a Toshiba laptop. I am running the laptop screen at high brightness and high contrast, although I have to say the display is distinctly inferior to the screens on my work station. The Intel HD Display is set for moderate brightness, contrast and gamma that gives me the best resolution with Google Maps.

 

I have Windows configured for pretty much the default options, with a custom background photo. The photo is the remarkable Hubble Deep Field - about 1500 galaxies in a black sky. However, it doesn't cause black backgrounds in the default Windows scroll bars. The windows "Color" setting is "light" and that produces a default white background for open windows. The Color accent is automatic (whatever that means). The current "Theme" is "Custom" because I have selected a custom photo.  Theme "color" is automatic.

 

Other programs like Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Paint), my CAD programs, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, Thunderbird, Internet Explorer/Edge, Teams, Zoom, GoTo, photo viewers, eDrawings, and printer/scanner utilities work with no problems with the scroll bars.

 

I have always been suspicious of "themes" created by web page designers who often have no clue what their pretty color schemes will do. Often they seem to be young twits who have spent their entire lives pecking at cell phones and have no understanding of how people use computers! Anything but the operating system default color scheme is just asking for trouble. It reminds me of the program MathCAD. They wanted a distinctive appearance, as if it would somehow improve the performance of the program (and that is all that matters). So they decided to scramble the normal Windows color scheme. But if a user changed the background color in windows it changed the colors in MathCAD in unpredictable ways. Some combinations made menus disappear into the background, others caused the text to disappear from the working window, etc. It made the program useless for anything but the Windows color settings that were on the programmers' computers while they were writing the program, and they weren't using the Windows defaults! Duh!

Edited November 10, 2021 by Dr PR

[mtaylor]

If you click on "theme" (the one with the down carot), you'll see three themes available from MSW.  I think you went to the IPS site not the ones available from MSW.  

[Dr PR]

I'm sorry if I ruffled a few feathers by suggesting any features that makes a program useless is asinine - but that is my opinion, and it comes from decades of programming experience. I have seen some really bonehead mistakes and poorly designed user interfaces!

 

Now, back to the problem. I opened MSW on Chrome, Opera and Edge, and the scroll bars are light gray background with a dark gray slider. I see Microsoft has purged Internet Explorer from my system in one of the updates, so I can't test it, and Safari never worked correctly on this machine.

 

Edit: Aha! I got Internet Explorer working again, and it has scroll bars with a light background and a dark slider.

 

So the problem is associated with Firefox - my normal browser.

 

I am not surprised. I have created four web sites, and there have always been incompatibilities between browser implementations of HTML and XHTML.  Usually it is Microsoft that has the strange implementation! Because I am aware of this I have always tested my code on all the available browsers, and modified it so it works the same on all of them. Apparently the ipsfocus programmers don't have much experience with these problems.

 

I'll fiddle with Firefox settings to see if I can fix the problem. To be continued ...

Edited November 10, 2021 by Dr PR

[Dr PR]

Mark,

 

You guessed right! I ended up on the ipsfocus themes page link - the one above the "Themes V" link.

 

I switched to the "ips unedited theme" and that solved the problem. This makes the Model Ship World web site much more user friendly - at least for me.

 

Thanks!

[mtaylor]

That's good.  If you had picked one off the the ISP site, it would not work as the theme has to be part of the website.  

 

As a former IT type, I've found that not all browsers are equal do I personally run 3 for different things.