On July 21, 2011, the day before Joe Brown began his 1.5 years as editor-in-chief of Gizmodo, he wrote 16 moving and influential words. “F**k Natural Scrolling. This Is Bullshit. Yours truly, a concerned Lion user. Returning to unnatural scrolling.” Lion had debuted almost two months prior, introducing natural or inverted scrolling. Ever since that fateful summer of 2011, Windows users have been finding ways to adopt it, and tons of Mac users have happily adjusted. Young ones may not even remember anything else. But as Brown so eloquently points out, users can turn natural scrolling off if they don’t like it. And Windows still defaults to “unnatural” scrolling.
Personally I never got on board. Natural scrolling seems anything but, and I have to really make my brain hurt to get the logic. Sure, I can use it if I have to, but it never becomes totally unconscious. And I realised that that’s strange because I essentially use natural scrolling in smartphone operating systems all the time without an issue. I also remember observing my mother, who had struggled with her laptop’s trackpad for years, having a revelatory experience when she upgraded to Lion. Unnatural scrolling had been holding her back. Which camp are you in or is it all the same to you? Make some gestures below.
UPDATE:
@lilyhnewman fuck natural scrolling
— Joe Brown (@joemfbrown) August 25, 2013
Image credit: Shutterstock/RHIMAGE