3 ms·

Hover _anything_ sucks IMO. I have noticed a trend lately where the hover delay seems to be drastically reduced. This means that as I move my mouse around a pag

Hover _anything_ sucks IMO. I have noticed a trend lately where the hover delay seems to be drastically reduced. This means that as I move my mouse around a page, I am constantly bombarded with hover popups that come and go. Quite often, these are right next to a top level thing that I want to click, so I then have to wait for the popup to disappear before I can click on my target.

eplanit 6y ago
The web interface to Amazon Prime videos is basically unusable because of the many hover behaviors they've added.
- leephillips 6y ago
  Hover states also make the Netflix website annoying.
  - jagger27 6y ago
    Right! When I’m just scrolling through the list I don’t need an autoplay kicking off just because I happened to rest my mouse there.
    - leephillips 6y ago
      Netflix is one of those sites where I find it hard to imagine that its designers ever tried to use it. It’s maddening.
    - julianlam 6y ago
      Thankfully after much griping, Netflix did add an option to disable this in your profile settings. That it's the default behaviour is still mind boggling.
datavirtue 6y ago
I feel like they reduced the delay in an attempt to increase usability. It's tough to slough through all the gatekeepers to get rid of something like the menu styling in a web app. You might get buy in across the team and then a key stakeholder goes on a diatribe of why they think we should keep it and then everyone else runs out of energy trying to counter every one of the rationales. The people fighting for change get tired and pick another battle.
suzzer99 6y ago
Utterly egregious example right here: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hover?s=ts https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hover?s=ts I'm always accidentally triggering the gigantic hover menu. So annoying.
ryandrake 6y ago
Another reason hover-anything is bad is because it is totally inaccessible. Observe a 90 year old with poor vision or someone with shaky hands trying to precisely position a mouse cursor over a UI element, while hover-popups are animating all over the place. It's a disaster. Do screen readers even work on hover elements? Need to stop designing the web as if all of your users are healthy 25 year olds.
- wwalexander 6y ago
  The most frustrating part of using Visual Studio Code for me is the hover/scroll behavior for error/warning messages in the code. You have to hover to view the error, and usually the message is out of the hover pane viewport at the bottom, below the type/value documentation. This would be fine, except for the fact that once you have scrolled to the bottom of the hover pane, further scroll events are applied to the code itself, so the hover pane scrolls out of focus and disappear. I spend an inordinate amount of time scrolling one notch at a time hoping for a glimpse of an error message. I only have in-depth VS Code experience writing Go with gopls so maybe this is a very niche issue but it’s so frustrating seeing so much wasted effort go into making and using and solving the weird inconsistencies of hover-based UI elements. The inevitable mess of hacky state management is an invented problem - the cursor should only affect state when buttons are pressed. I miss Plan 9.

eplanit 6y ago

The web interface to Amazon Prime videos is basically unusable because of the many hover behaviors they've added.

leephillips 6y ago
Hover states also make the Netflix website annoying.
- jagger27 6y ago
  Right! When I’m just scrolling through the list I don’t need an autoplay kicking off just because I happened to rest my mouse there.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    Netflix is one of those sites where I find it hard to imagine that its designers ever tried to use it. It’s maddening.
  - julianlam 6y ago
    Thankfully after much griping, Netflix did add an option to disable this in your profile settings. That it's the default behaviour is still mind boggling.

datavirtue 6y ago

I feel like they reduced the delay in an attempt to increase usability. It's tough to slough through all the gatekeepers to get rid of something like the menu styling in a web app. You might get buy in across the team and then a key stakeholder goes on a diatribe of why they think we should keep it and then everyone else runs out of energy trying to counter every one of the rationales. The people fighting for change get tired and pick another battle.

suzzer99 6y ago

Utterly egregious example right here: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hover?s=ts https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hover?s=ts I'm always accidentally triggering the gigantic hover menu. So annoying.

ryandrake 6y ago

Another reason hover-anything is bad is because it is totally inaccessible. Observe a 90 year old with poor vision or someone with shaky hands trying to precisely position a mouse cursor over a UI element, while hover-popups are animating all over the place. It's a disaster. Do screen readers even work on hover elements? Need to stop designing the web as if all of your users are healthy 25 year olds.

wwalexander 6y ago
The most frustrating part of using Visual Studio Code for me is the hover/scroll behavior for error/warning messages in the code. You have to hover to view the error, and usually the message is out of the hover pane viewport at the bottom, below the type/value documentation. This would be fine, except for the fact that once you have scrolled to the bottom of the hover pane, further scroll events are applied to the code itself, so the hover pane scrolls out of focus and disappear. I spend an inordinate amount of time scrolling one notch at a time hoping for a glimpse of an error message. I only have in-depth VS Code experience writing Go with gopls so maybe this is a very niche issue but it’s so frustrating seeing so much wasted effort go into making and using and solving the weird inconsistencies of hover-based UI elements. The inevitable mess of hacky state management is an invented problem - the cursor should only affect state when buttons are pressed. I miss Plan 9.