This has been bugging the hell out of me lately. I’m not sure when Edge started doing this, but it’s really quite annoying if you’re accustomed to using the vertical scrollbar on the right of the browser to “page” down or up by clicking the areas above and below the actual scrollbar “thumb” (the bit you can drag to scroll quickly). It doesn’t seem to happen on every site, it seems to be consistent on sites with content that spans all the way to the right-hand edge.
When reading a long blog post or web page, I usually position the mouse pointer near the bottom of the scrollbar and click to page down through the article as I progress. Unfortunately, in Edge the scrollbar now entirely disappears after a few seconds of mouse inactivity, and doesn’t automatically reactivate on a mouse click – only when you move the mouse pointer completely off the area where the scrollbar used to be, and then back over to where it should be. I find myself constantly having to look over to the right in order to perform that little dance every minute or so. Very distracting. I guess I could use the keyboard for Page Up/Page Down, but on laptops nowadays you need to use the Fn key to get those, and I find a left-click more convenient.
I wonder who thought this would be a good idea? I suppose there’s some non-mouse, non-desktop scenario (mobile?) where it makes sense, but on desktops it certainly violates the Principle of Least Astonishment, and since I don’t see any options to turn the behavior off, I guess I’ll have to live with it or switch back to Firefox…