[Adwaita Refresh] Undershoot indicator problems
The Adwaita refresh includes a more subtle overshoot indicator, which is a shadow instead of a dotted line.
There are a number of problems with this:
- The indicator looks buggy in a number of places, including scrollable popovers and inputs
- The indicator is basically invisible when it's at the bottom of a window
- A shadow has spatial implications, which can lead to very weird cases that don't make any sense (such as split header bars where there's a shadow only on one side)
Potential Solutions
I think there are too many issues with the shadow to be reasonabe to ship. However, going back to the dotted line would also not be great, as it's visually very stark and doesn't really fit in with the new, more subtle style.
As with the switches, this might be a situation where times have changed somewhat, and we could re-evaluate the original decision. Since the rise of mobile and responsive web design people expect to scroll in a lot more places, so perhaps it's no longer as important to have a persistent indicator for this.
There's also the fact that no other platform has a persistent visual indicator, and they seem to be doing ok without it. There are definitely edge cases to be taken into consideration, but nothing so severe that we need a solution as drastic as the current one.
Something I'd like to try is removing the indicator, but showing the scrollbar for a short time interval when a view loads. We already do this when the view changes, so it feels like a natural extension of that.