The Windows 95/98 scroll bars were vastly superior to those in Win10. No matter the size of the window or the scrollable content, you can tell what is the scroll bar and what isn't. On Win 10 it's sometimes ambiguous. Removing the scroll bar when you're not scrolling is the worst design decision.

Apple removed the scrollbar first, because they wanted the screen to look more beautiful and simpler. Instead you may not be able to tell that a page is scrollable, or maybe where you are on a page.

It's the definition of false simplicity.

Everyone followed suit because Apple Keynote events just made everything look so magical, and Mac/iPhone snobs were taken seriously by the dumbed-down press, and now Windows laptops and keyboards are like their previously-less-functional MacBook counterparts.

Hmm, idk, perhaps a midway between removal and hiding would be to collapse it to ~1px so you gain real estate but still see the position in the document?

Windows 95 users often had 640x480 screens. Somehow they managed to get work done while still displaying scrollbars at all times. I think we can manage on our modern, high-resolution displays.

I'm a KDE user, I'd let you set the scrollbar to autohide (complete or partial) and the width of the deployed scrollbar and partially-hidden one too.

I use that from time to time. Some applications and some desktop environments on Linux do that. It's horrible, might as well not have a visible scroll bar at all. I'm fine if they're a little more narrow than the traditional Windows 95 ones, and the color can certainly be improved (maybe translucent Windows task bar / color-adapting Android notification bar), but expanding or hidden scroll bars are both super annoying on desktops.

On mobile I'm fine with hidden ones. Since attempting to scroll down never has an unintended action (I'm sure someone on the Internet can name an exception, but I can't name a single one so it's not the common case) I always just try to scroll and notice when it doesn't go further.

Maybe for desktop, it might be solved by having a free spinning scroll wheel. Then you can flick like on mobile and nearly never need to actually drag the scroll bar. In the rare case that you do, you can still grab the one that appears on demand (like in many mobile apps), and by appearing on demand you have a visual indicator of how much more there is. (The home/end buttons also go a long way, but one doesn't always want to scroll to the end or use the keyboard.) But until we universally have such mice...

There's definitely a few exceptions, though they're mostly minor annoyances or caused by apps that expect you to be permanently online with a good connection.

The most frequent one I've seen on Android is swiping down while (almost) at the top, and the entire view refreshes. This is mostly in the browser, which simply reloads the page after a few seconds (resetting any text fields you may have modified) and in this case the gesture can be cancelled by reversing it. Unfortunately, if the browser or app has been open for a long time (say, I've left a news app open for three days), the view can be quite different once it finishes reloading, and can be impossible to get back to where I was previously.

Lazy-loading content can also cause issues when offline if the placeholders don't update (Materialistic, the app I'm using now, has both these issues).

Occasionally I'll find an app that likes to do annoying bouncy things with the view when overscrolling the bottom of a list, but that's fortunately rare.

Um, we have an alpha channel now on every single computing device display.

You can make a scrollbar that "ghosts" over/under the content.

To make them always visible, search Settings for "Automatically hide scroll bars in Windows" and untick the checkbox.