I second this. The green blob is very poor design. There aren't even any little arrows at the top and bottom like there is on EVERY OTHER PAGE ON THE INTERNET.
I could live with it if keyboard navigation worked, but there is no discernible way to scroll using the keyboard like EVERY OTHER PAGE ON THE INTERNET.

Why?!?!?!?!?!???????????????????????

I absolutely second this. And this isn't the only problem with this part of the interface ...

There are no arrows at the top/bottom of the scroll bar either .. bring them back!! I can think of absolutely NO good reason to remove that part of a browser's function.

Usability should trump design prettiness EVERY time.

I hacked a fix using the stylish plugin for Firefox. The following stylesheet gives you back the original scrollbars. Still, a less hackish solution would be great.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("theoldreader.com") {

/* scrollbar fix */
.slide {
right: 0 !important;
}
.pane {
display: none !important;
}

}

Agreed! I don't like the fancy-dancy scroll bar! Give me the old standard! You kids get off my lawn! ;)
Even though it's not as flashy, I like the standard Windows (or whatever) scrollbar as it's much easier to use. I appreciate being able to scroll to a certain section, or use the scroll button at the bottom to navigate. The toolbar on the Old Reader doesn't allow for that.

The Old Reader has become impossible to use on Firefox. The scroll bar disappears completely, will not allow scrolling to the bottom when it reappears, and is often completely unfindable when trying to scroll through unread posts. Without a stable, easily clickable scroll bar, I will be looking for yet another alternative to the soon-to-be-defunct Google Reader. BAD DESIGN.

Well everyone has already expressed it but I hate the custom scrollbar. Please bring back the system scrollbar. Thanks for being so responsive to your users.

The custom scroll bar doesnt work like a normal one either. It disappears under the bit at the top of the page, and when you click on the bar, it doesnt move a page in that direction, it jumps to the location you clicked on. Missing the arrows at the top and bottom to move it a little bit is also very frustrating.

Agreed - system scrollbar please.

I totally agree. It's a bad user experience mainly for these two reasons:

1. The draggable surface of the scrollbars is too small, and there is no real benefit to make it that thin in desktop browsers. Furthermore, the categories in the left panel are also draggable, so if the user wants to scroll but misses the scrollbar they will instead drag to reorder a category by mistake. I have accidently moved categories in this way 2-3 times already. I would sacrifice a little aesthetics in the name of usability by doubling the width of the scrollbars (or at least provide an option to have fat scrollbars). Another option is to make it harder to accidently reorder categories by reducing the draggable surface area of the categories (e.g., introduce drag handles, and only move when the drag handle is clicked upon).

2. In a normal windows model, you would click inside a panel to give it focus, and pressing PgUp/PgDn on a keyboard would scroll up/down on the panel that is in focus. However, in The Old Reader the right panel seems to always have the focus, so right now it is not possible to scroll the left panel by clicking inside it and pressing PgUp/PgDn. It would be great if you could provide proper panel focusing with a clear indication of which panel is in focus so that users would be able to quickly scroll through the panel using the keyboard (the urge to scroll using the keyboard would be lessened somewhat if the issue in #1 were to be resolved).

The current green scroll bar is unusable. Please revert to system scrollbars.

I can manage on my desktop PCs but it's sometimes quite hard to get the scrolling behavior to work properly on my iPad. Normal scroll bars would be appreciated.

I'd much prefer a standard scroll-bar both for consistency and for useability. I really struggle to find & use The Old Reader's custom scroll-bar.

In my view, if users want to have super-thin and semi-invisible scroll-bars, they should use their web browser to implement that. Individual website should simply let the web browser decide what the scroll bars should look like.

I agree - it's hard to see. A standard bigger scroll bar would be helpful. Thanks so much! Enjoying your Old Reader very much!

Obviously some people like it, but a lot of us don't because it's not easy to scroll with our hardware. Please make it optional.

I agree.
This customized scroll is both annoying and hard to find. Just leave the default scroll and it will be fine.
Or at least make it always visible AND larger. It's to thin to use.
It's a matter of usability not beauty!

yes, the scroll bar needs to be 'grabbable'. Right now the only way to read a long post is to pop it out into a browser tab... BOO!

This all adds to the same concept of giving the users better and easier control over some of *THE MOST BASIC* layout features.

Add to this the ability to maneuver the vertical break between the left folder/feed column and the right side ...

add the ability to shrink the amount of whitespace used between feed articles, especially in list view

add the ability to show more than 1 line of text in the preview (when you click the title the first time .. it opens to potentially show you a picture and a line "or two" of text ... so why not three to 5 lines of text?)

Again... USER controlled.

Yea, please use the normal scroll bar, this doesn't work very well (hard to see, scrolls slowly etc.)

I would even prefer if the page just displayed the STANDARD scrollbar rather than the floating one that doesn't have up and down arrows.