14 DAY TRIAL // The famous "almost invisible and difficult to make appear when you need them most" scrollbars in Unity 7 are going away, and they are being replaced by the upstream version from GNOME.
The idea was to have scrollbars that don't take a lot of screen space, and that only show up when they are needed. It's a good idea, but they never worked perfectly. It happens all too often to hover the mouse over some windows just to find the position of the scrollbar. Yes, they are nice, and you can't find anything like it anywhere, but they are going away, and it seems that it's all for the better.
Ubuntu developers have decided to implement the new scrollbars starting with this cycle, for Wily Werewolf. It's not a major change, and it's likely that many users won't even notice that something has changed, but the fact that Ubuntu users now have access to some normal (and quite beautiful) scrollbars is a good decision.
New overlay scrollbars for Unity 7
Users need to get one thing straight. These new scrollbars are Unity 7, which will be around for quite some time from now. It's not clear what kind of scrollbars will eventually land in Unity 8, but that's going to be decided in the future.
"The original Unity overlay scrollbars were designed to maximize the screen real estate available to applications and to minimize otherwise useless chrome. Upstream Gnome now have some nicely designed ones of their own, and so to minimize the maintenance effort of the Unity ones we've decided to adopt the Gnome ones for 15.10 onwards. This represents a considerable saving in engineering effort at each release, where we would normally have to spend time making sure the Unity ones work correctly with each new upstream release of Gnome," noted Will Cooke on Google+, who is also the leader of the Unity desktop at Canonical.
Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) is expected to land on October 22.
