5 ms·

This. It's bad enough already, pages can jump around many times if you start scrolling before they're "done" (which is hard to tell nowadays anyway). News site

This. It's bad enough already, pages can jump around many times if you start scrolling before they're "done" (which is hard to tell nowadays anyway). News site main pages tend to be the worst. Clicking through to a different article because the page re-rendered under my finger really gets my dander up.

StavrosK 7y ago
Isn't that a thing of the past, with scroll anchoring being a feature of most major browsers?
- gmueckl 7y ago
  Sadly, no. I experience many pages jumokng around wildly. Most often, the culprit seems to be ads that arrive late. Sometimes, it seems like pages are only requesting them when their intended position scrolls into view, so they pop up in the middle of the screen. So the browser must move either the upper half up or the lower half down to make space.
  - entropicdrifter 7y ago
    It's pretty depressing that so many otherwise modern UIs are totally broken whenever you're not using an ad-blocker
cptskippy 7y ago
I installed NoScript recently and was actually surprised by how many sites actually load low resolution placeholders and then swap them out with high res versions via Javascript. I'm assuming to avoid this jumping around.
- labawi 7y ago
  That's probably an effort to load a faster, maybe a leaner version for mobile/whatever. To actually prevent jumping (including on lean image load), I believe it would be more effective to simply set width and height.
  - cptskippy 7y ago
    I think it's a mix but most of the preloads I've encountered aren't just lower resolutions, rather they look like a smear of color. Like someone used a Gaussian blur filter with a 1000x pixel radius.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      Yeah, I could understand a 128x128 pixel version or something but when it's 10x10 why are you even bothering.
sidpatil 7y ago
I always assumed this a was a dark pattern designed to get people to click on lucrative links swapped in at the last minute.
- eru 7y ago
  Brownian motion plus commercial (or other) pressure can produce things that look like dark patterns. Very similar to evolution in biology. Assume that developers make essentially random mistakes or changes. Whenever anything happens that has a negative impact on metrics management cares about, there will be pressure to look what went wrong. Any random change that has a benign impact on measured metrics, eg weird page loading that makes people accidentally click on more lucrative links, there will be no pressure to revert. No one needs to consciously look for and implement dark patterns for this to work out. It's very similar to how confirmation bias can make people question news they don't like until they find enough evidence to disregard them; but are just accepting news they do like.

StavrosK 7y ago

Isn't that a thing of the past, with scroll anchoring being a feature of most major browsers?

gmueckl 7y ago
Sadly, no. I experience many pages jumokng around wildly. Most often, the culprit seems to be ads that arrive late. Sometimes, it seems like pages are only requesting them when their intended position scrolls into view, so they pop up in the middle of the screen. So the browser must move either the upper half up or the lower half down to make space.
- entropicdrifter 7y ago
  It's pretty depressing that so many otherwise modern UIs are totally broken whenever you're not using an ad-blocker

cptskippy 7y ago

I installed NoScript recently and was actually surprised by how many sites actually load low resolution placeholders and then swap them out with high res versions via Javascript. I'm assuming to avoid this jumping around.

labawi 7y ago
That's probably an effort to load a faster, maybe a leaner version for mobile/whatever. To actually prevent jumping (including on lean image load), I believe it would be more effective to simply set width and height.
- cptskippy 7y ago
  I think it's a mix but most of the preloads I've encountered aren't just lower resolutions, rather they look like a smear of color. Like someone used a Gaussian blur filter with a 1000x pixel radius.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    Yeah, I could understand a 128x128 pixel version or something but when it's 10x10 why are you even bothering.

sidpatil 7y ago

I always assumed this a was a dark pattern designed to get people to click on lucrative links swapped in at the last minute.

eru 7y ago
Brownian motion plus commercial (or other) pressure can produce things that look like dark patterns. Very similar to evolution in biology. Assume that developers make essentially random mistakes or changes. Whenever anything happens that has a negative impact on metrics management cares about, there will be pressure to look what went wrong. Any random change that has a benign impact on measured metrics, eg weird page loading that makes people accidentally click on more lucrative links, there will be no pressure to revert. No one needs to consciously look for and implement dark patterns for this to work out. It's very similar to how confirmation bias can make people question news they don't like until they find enough evidence to disregard them; but are just accepting news they do like.