Gmail’s new scrollbars subtly prevent me from sending mail.

In the last 2 weeks, I’ve noticed on several occasions I’ve thought I’d sent mail only to find it sitting as a “Draft” in Gmail. I began to think there was a horrible bug in Gmail and was having flashbacks to the days of figuring out why Outlook would leave mail stuck in your outbox.

Today I figured it out. It’s the scrollbars.

When you start replying to the message, assuming you scroll down a little into the body (which I seem to do often on my laptop’s screen, but less often on a desktop screen) the “send” button scrolls off. But, it’s not obvious that you’ve lost the send button, because there is still a top row of buttons. I wind up, subconsciously, clicking the “back arrow” button as the closest thing to “send” or “reply.”

If the scrollbars were the traditional browser-standard ones, it would be obvious to me that I’m in a frame that had scrolled down. For example, it’s obvious inside the message pane itself. As it stands now, I don’t even notice that a row of buttons has scrolled off of the page, since only part of the page is scrolling, and it’s doing so very subtly.

One thought on “Gmail’s new scrollbars subtly prevent me from sending mail.

  1. Tom, this has happened to me about 7 times. I thought I was just losing my mind. That my absent-minded behavior had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Now I have a scapegoat.

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