What if there are 500 comments at the end of the article?

Or you're a Mac OS or iOS user and the scrollbar will be invisible when you're not scrolling.

So because one browser developer fucks over its UI, you should fuck over the UI of all other browsers, too?

Looks as if it's only the length of the article body.

A little superfluous, but I can dig it.

Because the browser scrollbar indicates where you are in the page, not your progress through an article.

while i mostly agree, it does make it clearer that it's your progress across an entire article: with just the scrollbar you never know if you'll be facing "page 2, 3" links at the bottom.

If the article was on one page this wouldn't be an issue.

It's still an issue...

I often wonder how far an article really goes. A lot of the times there are tons of content below the article, or perhaps just a long commenting thread twice as long as the article itself (or, as stated, a multiple page article (which you don't know about in advance)). I often scroll down for the sole purpose of finding out how long the article is.

I really like the information the New Republic conveys (but I dislike having a bar on top like that).

What is it with these sites that break down articles into several pages? NYTimes is a particular culprit that annoys me. Does anyone find an article easier to read in this format? I presume it is to force more Ad views on people?

There's some research that, that people like content paged.

Here's one such paper http://hfs.sagepub.com/content/25/3/279.short

>I presume it is to force more Ad views on people?

Yep

On touch screens it usually disappears?

because the browser scrollbar isn't necessarily present on a Mac.