Despite being a heavy cell phone user for more than 25 years, it only recently occurred to me that vertical navigation on most phones is inverted when compared to traditional computers. You swipe down to navigate upward, and up to navigate downward. I recently spent time using a MacBook, which apparently defaults to this “natural” scrolling (mobile-style), and I was completely thrown off by it.
I’ve been using natural scrolling on a couple of my own desktops ever since, mostly as a mental exercise, and I wondered…how many of you folks prefer this method?
Natural scrolling acts as if you’re pushing a piece of paper up and down with your finger. Normal mouse scrolling acts as if you’re using the mouse wheel to move a piece of paper.
Both are leaky abstractions, neither is natural or unnatural. “Natural scrolling” is just a fancy name for “we prefer scrolling the other way around”.
It’s like calling putting the close button in the top left “natural window controls” because that’s what macOS does.