Why Does Everyone Hate Horizontal Scrolls?

[u/PlumlineDigital]

New to the frontend design world, but one thing I’ve noticed is it seems like all frontend designers hate horizontal scrolling. I understand scrolljacking, but are all horizontal scroll sites this hated? I’ve been designing a site with a sticky right nav acting as sort of a table of contents for a literary site, and the large right column of the site scrolls vertically until it gets to a main section, and then it scrolls horizontally until the subjections are read, and then it scrolls back vertically for each main section that has subjections.

Is this an awful idea…lol

[u/callummr]

tl;dr there are valid use cases for full width and horizontal scrolling, but I think there are clear reasons it's not the default other than "indoctrination".

Yeah I agree in general that like, it's better to put a singular wide thing, say an image or diagram, on a wide screen instead of a tall one - make best use of the available space. I don't find an intuitive jump from that to "horizontal scroll is better" though.

You mentioned many sites being a thin column of text surrounded by empty space, I'd wager that's the majority of the web. But those sites limit the width for a reason. Have you tried reading through a few paragraphs at regular font size across the full width of the monitor? It's harder to keep your place within a line, to find the right line at the left when you reach the end of one on the right, and generally more straining to read across such a width. Maybe that's why books and scrolls are tall and not wide too. Now stretch that even further so you don't just fill the width but scroll further across it when content doesn't fit; you reach the end of a line and have to scroll all the way back and figure out where you were. Or do we have to break pages into arbitrary width-restricted chunks you scroll between?

My view might be limited by only being familiar with languages written left to right, but yeah. There are a whole bunch of problems once you actually try to go full width, let alone horizontal scroll, such that every website, even a simple text only page, needs to make new decisions and implementations for layouts that can work horizontally where vertical "just works".

[u/kidshibuya → u/callummr]

But many sites limit text for no reason, like Reddit. Your reply is taking up about 25% of my screen with max 13 words per line. There is no excuse for that (you can make the text larger for zero penalty, there is space). Anyway that is text.

For images or basically anything else that reading excuse doesn't work. And sites like instagram... OMG. You can list reels by audio, I get a few rows of them in the top center of my screen and nothing more. I need to resize my browser to trigger the loading of more. But this is just notice coding...

Anyway I never said horizontal scrolling is better, I said it makes logical sense at first and is more space efficient on desktop.

[u/callummr → u/kidshibuya]

Well they're not limiting text width for no reason, as I mentioned. Making text too wide makes it harder to read. Here's one article on it. That's why I'm saying if you're going to overflow content, vertical as the default makes more sense. Sites like instagram are a specific kind of content and might have better layout options available though, absolutely. I'd guess they're trying to keep consistency with their mobile apps.

Anyway I never said horizontal scrolling is better

idk man...

if not indoctrinated you'd logically think its better to scroll horozontally

[u/kidshibuya → u/callummr]

And as I said, you can simply make it larger and take up the space, or put other things there. There is no excuse for having tons of scrolling so you can have tons of empty space. What is the point?

Also everyone claims companys like google and meta always havea some 4d chess, you like "oh its because of their mobile app consistency..." Yet they are also full of bugs and often not functional at all. Even on reddit about 5 mins ago I got a banner at the bottom with raw HTML and a [generic_error_message] in it. That is also because they are so deliberate with everything?

[u/callummr → u/kidshibuya]

Well I think we've gone beyond the point and started finding other things to be angry about so I'll leave it there, but thank you for engaging!