There’s a Much Faster Way to Scroll on Your IPhone
When you start scrolling through a long web page, message thread, or document on your iPhone, you see a scroll bar on the right edge. It’s a thin gray pill that disappears almost instantly when you stop swiping the screen, making it feel like Apple doesn’t even want it there. But you must want it there. In fact, if you ignore the scroll bar on your iPhone, you are scrolling the wrong way.
Scrollbars served a real purpose in desktop operating systems. First you have to click the top to go up, the bottom to go down the page. But as interfaces improved, you could click on the scrollbar itself and use your mouse to move anywhere on the page with ease and precision. This is how we’ve been scrolling on desktops since the 70s , and it still works today (although scroll wheels and trackpads are far more popular).
It turns out that the same can be done on your iPhone. Swipe once to open the powerful scroll bar; then press and hold the gray pill on the edge. When you feel a tactile touch on your iPhone, that’s your signal: you’ve now grabbed the scroll bar. Move your finger up and down to navigate the page faster than ever before. Once you get the hang of the movement, you can scroll through long pages on your iPhone quickly and accurately.
This isn’t the end of weird gestures, by the way, that can help you navigate your iPhone better. You may know that you can tap the top of the screen to scroll up the current page, but you can also use three-finger swipe gestures to quickly undo and redo text anywhere. We’ve covered more weird iPhone gestures here , so take a look if you need more.