hey capt i agree i think the fat scrollbar should be an option though a capability that you can disable and/or enable

how about a semi-transparent fat scrollbar? How hard would it be to implement this?

Thanks,
Isaac.S

The trouble with a semi-transparent fat scrollbar is that you're covering content under it. So you either need someway of popping it out of the way (to access that content) or you have content that doesn't get any user interaction. In the latter case, a good argument can be made for drag scrolling, hopefully inertial. And while it's been suggested that kinetic scrolling is bad for some types of content, a well-designed system will do what you want -- it'll differentiate between a drag and a "flick", and keep that behavior including threshold constant across as many apps as possible.
I've nothing against the idea of a semi-trans-fat-scrollbar (pun intended), but it seems of limited application. And anywhere it's not helpful, I'd rather not have transparency. Eye-candy bloat does cause sluggish performance, even if each change is small, and we seem to be talking of changes here which we'd like to see system-wide.
I'd like all scrollbars just about 1.5~2x the OS2007 width. Not really fat, but just enough to make finger grabbing reliable. Right now, I've no problem with scrollbars at the edges (slide finger along bezel), but ones out in the middle of the screen can be awkward. And, for all non-interactive content, I'd like kinetic (both drag and inertial) scrolling.

For the file-manager, and indeed for anything else where you must be able to select items from a list, one possibility that would make me happy is two split the list in two vertically. Taps/drags on the left half would select one/multiple items. Drags on the right half would scroll the list. The background color could be changed slightly to visually differentiate the halves; perhaps better, in lists where the items are separated by dividing lines of some sort, is to have those dividers disappear (fade out over ~20 px) as you go from the left half (separate, selectable items) to the right half (continuous, draggable list). Kagu is partial inspiration here; this isn't the same idea, but is applicable to, e.g. an album/track selector list.

Sorry for the necro-post, but why not make the scrollbar in microb invisible? why not just have a large "drag area" on the right like on most modern touchpads, letting you scroll by dragging your finger down the right-most edge?