6 ms·

"Let's click on this link... ah, not that link, let's go back. Yes, this link... NO! STOP MOVING!" This is my #1 complaint about reddit. Not due to fonts; but

"Let's click on this link... ah, not that link, let's go back. Yes, this link... NO! STOP MOVING!" This is my #1 complaint about reddit. Not due to fonts; but rather when I load reddit on my phone, a "get the reddit app" banner appears... timed perfectly so that my attempt to view my messages sends me off to the app store.

Mahn 10y ago
Heck, this is my #1 complaint of almost anything on a mobile browser. It's easily the worst offender when it comes to mobile in general; I wish browser vendors put a bigger focus on fixing this, somehow.
- wruza 10y ago
  Browser vendors against adclicks, mice against cheese, bees against honey, what you gonna do now?
  - paublyrne 10y ago
    Mice aren't really interested in cheese.
    - haimez 10y ago
      Please, describe how this "mouse" consumes anything other than "cheese" for sustenance.
      - saghm 10y ago
        Actually, I think he meant it literally: http://www.earthkind.com/blog/fact-or-fiction-do-mice-really-love-cheese-or-is-this-just-a-myth-cartoons-have-been-feeding-us http://www.earthkind.com/blog/fact-or-fiction-do-mice-really...
        wruza 10y ago
        What a great example of really bad webfont. That page almost broke my eyes, when saving island of bold fb comments came to the rescue. People lost in thin-line madness.
        saghm 10y ago
        I guess my link was more relevant than I thought!
    - lisivka 10y ago
      Mice likes cheese, but only if cheese is good. Most of current cheeses are made from fresh milk, which is not fermented enough to be edible.
    - DeadBabyOrgasm 10y ago
      Exactly. They're masters of subtlety, manipulating our species to evolve in just the right way, learn just the right things. We don't experiment on them so much as they experiment on us. Masters of subtlety...
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  Google is fixing it, but it's punishing them in search, not Chrome. http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/08/google-to-punish-sites-that-use-intrusive-pop-over-ads/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/08/google-to-punish-sit...
  - eterm 10y ago
    Which will lead to the same hack as paywalled news sites, the ads won't load when referred from google meanwhile the rest will suffer.
    - marblar 10y ago
      So users reaching a site through google have a better experience than users accessing it through some other method? This seems like a pretty good thing from Google's perspective...
      - eterm 10y ago
        Absolutely, and further extends their embrace over the web. I suspect google are probably wary about moves that push themselves much further right now, the last thing they want to do is look like a monopoly.
      - DeadBabyOrgasm 10y ago
        Sounds like a good reason to build a plugin to always sets the http referrer header to google.com on certain news sites.
        colejohnson66 10y ago
        Is there any good reason for having the "Referer:" tag at all?
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    Google also has tech to show these banners but only if you've visited the same site a few times already, and then not every time. (This link talks about web app installs first, then native app installs later) https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/increasing-engagement-with-app-install-banners-in-chrome-for-android https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/increasing... "The user has visited your site twice over two separate days during the course of two weeks."
- at-fates-hands 10y ago
  Didn't this start on the desktop and now because companies think it was successful on desktops, they need to extend it to mobile since they think everyone has 4G service? I remember when your mobile experience was supposed to be a stripped down faster version of your desktop version. Now, they're both insanely hard to navigate and use. So much for we dev progression, huh?
  - planteen 10y ago
    I used to get the mobile versions of pages on the desktop. Not because I was on a slow connection, just because the text is the meat for most things on the Internet. Now there's less of a point in doing that.
nwatson 10y ago
I'm convinced this page-jumps-as-you're-about-to-touch is a dark pattern to some clickbait time-waster sites use to get more mobile ad clicks. Just when I'm about to click 'Next' to see the 7th-of-53 stoopid-photos-taken-at-Walmart an ad link jumps to be right under my finger.
- Practicality 10y ago
  You gotta stop going to those sites. :)
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Firewall them -- on the device or router. It's what all the cool kids are doing these days.
losteric 10y ago
I'm starting to suspect that behavior is intentional. I see this all the time with mobile ads... a site slowly loads as I read content, then an ad pops up right when I try to navigate. Incredibly frustrating. It's like advertisers want me to install adblock... so I will, I'll root my device and adblock all their bullshit forever.
- truth_sentinell 10y ago
  That's so annoying. Worst thing is that adblocks are not as easily available as in desktops. I'm on windows phone 10, my only browser is Edge, so I'm really fucked.
  - luxpir 10y ago
    Set up pihole or similar at home and none of your devices will see ads. It's great fun and makes a nice difference on mobile.
    - truth_sentinell 10y ago
      Thanks for the suggestion, but it doesn't seem good for me. Blocking things at DNS level, can be counterproductive. Maybe there's a false positive that's been blocked and it will probably a headache to find it.
      - michaelmior 10y ago
        I don't think I've ever experienced this. Perhaps the lists I was using were just particularly conservative.
      - luxpir 10y ago
        It's pretty easy to whitelist a whole domain... the domains on the lists are pretty comprehensively ad-related. Your call, but it certainly is one solution.
  - alanh 10y ago
    This makes it all the more regrettable that Microsoft buried the competition and you are stuck with Windows forever: http://developers-club.com/posts/104034/ http://developers-club.com/posts/104034/
skykooler 10y ago
This even happens on Youtube, on a 200 mbit+ connection - I go to a page, and just as I reach over to click a link some stylesheet finally shows up and everything moves up by twenty pixels.
odbol_ 10y ago
Why aren't you using Reddit Sync yet? Who uses the mobile site these days anyway?
- ENGNR 10y ago
  For me it's about tabs. Can't stand when an app opens a URL in a mini browser inside itself. If it's a web link just open it in the damn browser!
  - tdkl 10y ago
    There's an option to open the website in external browser, chrome tab or internal browser. Not only in Reddit Sync (which is great), but in every other Reddit app as well. Btw, opening the website in the Chrome tab is basically the same (session state, cookies are same) as opening it in Chrome, it's just way faster - specially on RAM challenged devices.
wfunction 10y ago
Same thing with the Facebook app; whenever you're searching for something, it shows the result you want, but then like 0.5-1 second later it pops up a different result above it so you tap the wrong thing. Drives me insane.
- ovao 10y ago
  Ugh, I feel you. I've trained myself not to tap on a result unless I've waited several seconds. Life improved immeasurably.
- godshatter 10y ago
  I get around this by not going to Facebook except when a relative or friend dies or the zombie apocalypse starts.
ge96 10y ago
Member when YouTube used to do that with search results except it was an ad
dredmorbius 10y ago
Best suggestion I've seen on this: click events apply to whatever had been in the location ~300ms BEFORE you selected it. Turns out humans can't respond much more quickly than that. I wish I could credit the source but I don't recall -- HN or Reddit probably. I'm also still not sure this solves the full problem. On mobile, there's generally the problem that a touch and a drag are two different actions, but they're not clearly distinguished. There's a tremendous amount of ambiguity over just where you can or cannot touch on a given web page to accomplish a click, and increasingly pages have very few "safe" whitespace zones. Examples coming to mind: Chrome/Android history -- the delete-item 'x' will also open the link in the current browser tab. I've found clearing history to be tedious (there's no way to select multiple items, or a date range, say -- you can only delete items one-at-a-time, and not too fast...). On YouTube/Mobile, the entire panel of a search result is a clickable zone, making scrolling the page without inadvertently opening a video you're not interested in all but impossible. It's abysmally poor UI/UX in both cases.

Mahn 10y ago

Heck, this is my #1 complaint of almost anything on a mobile browser. It's easily the worst offender when it comes to mobile in general; I wish browser vendors put a bigger focus on fixing this, somehow.

wruza 10y ago
Browser vendors against adclicks, mice against cheese, bees against honey, what you gonna do now?
- paublyrne 10y ago
  Mice aren't really interested in cheese.
  - haimez 10y ago
    Please, describe how this "mouse" consumes anything other than "cheese" for sustenance.
    - saghm 10y ago
      Actually, I think he meant it literally: http://www.earthkind.com/blog/fact-or-fiction-do-mice-really-love-cheese-or-is-this-just-a-myth-cartoons-have-been-feeding-us http://www.earthkind.com/blog/fact-or-fiction-do-mice-really...
      - wruza 10y ago
        What a great example of really bad webfont. That page almost broke my eyes, when saving island of bold fb comments came to the rescue. People lost in thin-line madness.
        saghm 10y ago
        I guess my link was more relevant than I thought!
  - lisivka 10y ago
    Mice likes cheese, but only if cheese is good. Most of current cheeses are made from fresh milk, which is not fermented enough to be edible.
  - DeadBabyOrgasm 10y ago
    Exactly. They're masters of subtlety, manipulating our species to evolve in just the right way, learn just the right things. We don't experiment on them so much as they experiment on us. Masters of subtlety...
theandrewbailey 10y ago
Google is fixing it, but it's punishing them in search, not Chrome. http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/08/google-to-punish-sites-that-use-intrusive-pop-over-ads/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/08/google-to-punish-sit...
- eterm 10y ago
  Which will lead to the same hack as paywalled news sites, the ads won't load when referred from google meanwhile the rest will suffer.
  - marblar 10y ago
    So users reaching a site through google have a better experience than users accessing it through some other method? This seems like a pretty good thing from Google's perspective...
    - eterm 10y ago
      Absolutely, and further extends their embrace over the web. I suspect google are probably wary about moves that push themselves much further right now, the last thing they want to do is look like a monopoly.
    - DeadBabyOrgasm 10y ago
      Sounds like a good reason to build a plugin to always sets the http referrer header to google.com on certain news sites.
      - colejohnson66 10y ago
        Is there any good reason for having the "Referer:" tag at all?
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  Google also has tech to show these banners but only if you've visited the same site a few times already, and then not every time. (This link talks about web app installs first, then native app installs later) https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/increasing-engagement-with-app-install-banners-in-chrome-for-android https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/increasing... "The user has visited your site twice over two separate days during the course of two weeks."
at-fates-hands 10y ago
Didn't this start on the desktop and now because companies think it was successful on desktops, they need to extend it to mobile since they think everyone has 4G service? I remember when your mobile experience was supposed to be a stripped down faster version of your desktop version. Now, they're both insanely hard to navigate and use. So much for we dev progression, huh?
- planteen 10y ago
  I used to get the mobile versions of pages on the desktop. Not because I was on a slow connection, just because the text is the meat for most things on the Internet. Now there's less of a point in doing that.

nwatson 10y ago

I'm convinced this page-jumps-as-you're-about-to-touch is a dark pattern to some clickbait time-waster sites use to get more mobile ad clicks. Just when I'm about to click 'Next' to see the 7th-of-53 stoopid-photos-taken-at-Walmart an ad link jumps to be right under my finger.

Practicality 10y ago
You gotta stop going to those sites. :)
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Firewall them -- on the device or router. It's what all the cool kids are doing these days.

losteric 10y ago

I'm starting to suspect that behavior is intentional. I see this all the time with mobile ads... a site slowly loads as I read content, then an ad pops up right when I try to navigate. Incredibly frustrating. It's like advertisers want me to install adblock... so I will, I'll root my device and adblock all their bullshit forever.

truth_sentinell 10y ago
That's so annoying. Worst thing is that adblocks are not as easily available as in desktops. I'm on windows phone 10, my only browser is Edge, so I'm really fucked.
- luxpir 10y ago
  Set up pihole or similar at home and none of your devices will see ads. It's great fun and makes a nice difference on mobile.
  - truth_sentinell 10y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion, but it doesn't seem good for me. Blocking things at DNS level, can be counterproductive. Maybe there's a false positive that's been blocked and it will probably a headache to find it.
    - michaelmior 10y ago
      I don't think I've ever experienced this. Perhaps the lists I was using were just particularly conservative.
    - luxpir 10y ago
      It's pretty easy to whitelist a whole domain... the domains on the lists are pretty comprehensively ad-related. Your call, but it certainly is one solution.
- alanh 10y ago
  This makes it all the more regrettable that Microsoft buried the competition and you are stuck with Windows forever: http://developers-club.com/posts/104034/ http://developers-club.com/posts/104034/

skykooler 10y ago

This even happens on Youtube, on a 200 mbit+ connection - I go to a page, and just as I reach over to click a link some stylesheet finally shows up and everything moves up by twenty pixels.

odbol_ 10y ago

Why aren't you using Reddit Sync yet? Who uses the mobile site these days anyway?

ENGNR 10y ago
For me it's about tabs. Can't stand when an app opens a URL in a mini browser inside itself. If it's a web link just open it in the damn browser!
- tdkl 10y ago
  There's an option to open the website in external browser, chrome tab or internal browser. Not only in Reddit Sync (which is great), but in every other Reddit app as well. Btw, opening the website in the Chrome tab is basically the same (session state, cookies are same) as opening it in Chrome, it's just way faster - specially on RAM challenged devices.

wfunction 10y ago

Same thing with the Facebook app; whenever you're searching for something, it shows the result you want, but then like 0.5-1 second later it pops up a different result above it so you tap the wrong thing. Drives me insane.

ovao 10y ago
Ugh, I feel you. I've trained myself not to tap on a result unless I've waited several seconds. Life improved immeasurably.
godshatter 10y ago
I get around this by not going to Facebook except when a relative or friend dies or the zombie apocalypse starts.

ge96 10y ago

Member when YouTube used to do that with search results except it was an ad

dredmorbius 10y ago

Best suggestion I've seen on this: click events apply to whatever had been in the location ~300ms BEFORE you selected it. Turns out humans can't respond much more quickly than that. I wish I could credit the source but I don't recall -- HN or Reddit probably. I'm also still not sure this solves the full problem. On mobile, there's generally the problem that a touch and a drag are two different actions, but they're not clearly distinguished. There's a tremendous amount of ambiguity over just where you can or cannot touch on a given web page to accomplish a click, and increasingly pages have very few "safe" whitespace zones. Examples coming to mind: Chrome/Android history -- the delete-item 'x' will also open the link in the current browser tab. I've found clearing history to be tedious (there's no way to select multiple items, or a date range, say -- you can only delete items one-at-a-time, and not too fast...). On YouTube/Mobile, the entire panel of a search result is a clickable zone, making scrolling the page without inadvertently opening a video you're not interested in all but impossible. It's abysmally poor UI/UX in both cases.