Firefox

Interesting. I use a 32" 1440p screen (100% scaling) and I prefer the smaller one. I always found scroll bars to be unnecessarily large (especially in drop downs) as I solely use then as a visual indicator.

I'm glad we have options so everyone can have their preferred size!

There's a good reason they are done that way, namely that few people ever need to directly interact with them. People instead scroll content with their mouse wheel, touchpad or via touch devices directly, and hence the scroll bar is relegated to a pure indicator of roughly where on the page you are, which for many pages isn't even necessary.

That being said: If you set Windows 11 to "Always show scroll bars" - which you would if you need them as actual input surfaces - then it also signals all apps to show them at full size again. Which Firefox in fact does, as I just found out.

I seldom care to manually interact with it, but by god do I hate when it's so narrow, low-contrast, and auto-hiding as to be virtually invisible (and I'm not even visually impaired!).

I want to know where I am, and how long the document is. Why are modern GUIs trying so hard to hide this information from me while pretending they aren't, like a child stubbornly avoiding eye contact when the teacher asks a question?

Not OP but here's one use case. I use FF as a PDF reader, it's faster than Nitro and Adobe opening files and searching within. When I have a 600+ page Admin Guide open scrolling is prohibitive. When I do a text search FF puts location indicators in the scroll bar. A larger scrollbar is better visually and easier to interact with.

Also, what kind of psycho uses a touch screen on a desktop computer?

I use the scroll bar at home mostly because the scroll wheel on my mouse is finicky. If I don't scroll just right it'll scroll down a little before scrolling right back up or just not scroll down at all. So it's more convenient for me to just use the scroll bar.

I use a Wacom tablet in place of a mouse (for work, and because I get serious arm pain after about ~30mn of using a mouse) and while it has a "touch ring", it requires me to let go of the stylus and it's not very sensitive at all, making for a poor replacement of a mouse wheel. Some time ago I got myself a macropad with big rotary knobs and they do the job, but for years I relied on scrollbars.

In Firefox, never. In some applications, they have the "lines per tick" for your scroll wheel WAY too low, like 1 per. In those applications I try to, but they inevitably have visual-only scroll bars.

Pretty much never for me except when I remote in to MacOS machines for some reason Shift + Mouse Wheel doesn't scroll horizontally. So I have to tap a left or right arrow key and then drag the bar.