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This is my most useful bookmark, I use it everywhere (it's even practical on an iphone) So many sites have a top banner that disappears as you scroll down a pa

This is my most useful bookmark, I use it everywhere (it's even practical on an iphone) So many sites have a top banner that disappears as you scroll down a page, but as soon as you scroll upwards even a little bit, it pops up again. This is immensely frustrating because I tend to read at the top of a page and scroll down as I'm reading. So if I scroll down slightly too far and then correct myself, the banner will instantly obscure the bit of the text I'm trying to read. It's very satisfying to be able to click on the bookmark and fix the site's crap design!

svnpenn 4y ago
Yes, yes, yes! I am so sick of sites putting fixed top bar, and fixed side bars as well. Add "clever" bar animation in as well, and you get the awful UX we have today. Classic case of people inventing a problem to solve.
- darepublic 4y ago
  For some ui, fixed sidebar is fine imo. The headers that scroll down with you, on the other hand, can go extinct
  - JoshTriplett 4y ago
    Fixed sidebar doesn't work well for mobile devices. A button to show them works, though.
    - darepublic 4y ago
      yes I mean on desktop. Original comment was something along the lines of all position fixed is bad, which I don't agree with. If it doesn't cause distress, doesn't distract the user, I don't take issue with it.
- Kerrick 4y ago
  It's not just the awful UX of today. It's the awful UX of yesteryear, except this time it's the website owner's fault. https://i.stack.imgur.com/pOAAU.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/pOAAU.jpg
ravenstine 4y ago
One of the banes of my existence! There's no place for these stupid effing banners when browsers have inertia scrolling and infinite-scrolling sites have fixed headers (or footers) visible all the time. Maybe I wouldn't be so frustrated if the tolerance for what makes a header reappear wasn't ~3px, which is what I often perceive it to be. It totally misunderstands human behavior, which isn't to read an article word by word all the way through like a robot but to reread things to better comprehend them and jump around an article to make sense of connected ideas.
- panarky 4y ago
  Also useful for nuking paywall overlays. Works great at The Atlantic, one click and you're in.
  - charsi 4y ago
    Just disable javascript in ublock origin for the site and you don't have to even worry about clicking anything. Lots of news sites deliver the content and then try to block access to it using javascript.
    - panarky 4y ago
      You don't need uBo to block JavaScript, you can do that right in the browser. But often blocking JS means parts of the article don't display or the site breaks in other ways. Washington Post for example only shows blurry placeholder photos with JS off. The kill-sticky or the element zapper in uBo can sometimes do what blocking JS cannot.
gumby 4y ago
Or those stupid floating bars that cover the top of the screen, so when you press space to scroll a line or two is obscured. What are they thinking?
- Lio 4y ago
  I've heard them called "vanity flaps", which seems to describe them perfectly. I guess they're useful when the content is of low quality but you're desperate to keep eyes on the name of your site. I hate them. About the only thing worse than self-hiding vanity flap is a floating side bar using a slow animation to slide back into your field of view, just terrible.
  - wruza 4y ago
    slow animation to slide back into your field of view I have a special section in my uBlock user rules, and it is full of annoyances like this. Another one is an element with popup on hover, but you can only close it by hover-unhover a popup itself. Fly across such element by accident and enjoy your semi-modal “no idea how to get rid of”-popup without even clicking anywhere.
- wruza 4y ago
  I believe this is a collective failure. First, developers praise the web/html/css ways to do things and want nothing more. Then they meet a complex layout problem (page-scrolling of an element which is partially covered) and find no solution, because they got what they wanted and nothing more. Nobody reports it as a bug or a FR, or it gets scrutinized as “Do we really need it? Here is a complex way to do that, incompatible with most designs, but doable, right?” and then gets closed as inactive, cause nothing adequate can be commented upon it. Developers develop selective blindness to very obvious layout bugs. The cycle repeats. So many hours spent on nothing when a simple `viewport-offset-{top,…}: 20px` could solve it once and for all. Instead we will support global nonsense described in the article for years, despite it stays nonsense at any angle.
NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
Why are front end developers like this?
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  I suspect most of them are not like this. But their customer is not you; it's the website manager. And that manager gets promoted not by providing a great user experience but by shoving the company's name into your face as much as possible. (And also by maximizing conversions, ad clicks, and engagement. Oof. Writing that sentence makes me want to throw up.)
  - wruza 4y ago
    It is okay and works as intended. The logical move is to fix the platform, which is obviously broken. Not to blame developers. If you have external rules which motivate people to do more X sacrificing Y, but your goal is more Y, make Y one-liner and only then they will follow Y at their workplaces. On a web scale everything becomes a market and you can’t regulate a market by “don’t do that because it’s bad”. They will never have enough time for that.
- sethherr 4y ago
  I'm an enthusiastic supporter of auto-hiding headers and have added them to sites. I don't understand the hate? It's easy to scroll back down again and have the header re-hide (ie overscroll when you see it happening and then scroll down). To me, this is better usability. I agree - fixed headers obscure the page and it's bad. But simultaneously, it's nice to be able to access the header and navigation instantly. This seems like a good compromise?
  - KapKap55 4y ago
    How often do you really need to access the header and navigation "instantly"? In comparison, how often do you need to reread or verify information from a previous paragraph, or review a chart or graph you viewed earlier? It's fairly obvious which one is actually more important in the majority of cases and it's going to be the actual information you're currently reading through. Obscuring the actual content in any form is a direct reduction to page usability.
NotPractical 4y ago
Interesting that `javascript:` bookmarklets work on iPhones, given Apple's track record of locking everything down. Neat! Browser extensions are still notoriously difficult to get on mobile for some reason (even on Android, which is open source-ish). So far the best method I've found for injecting JS into sites on Android is the Bromite [1] browser, a Chromium fork that allows you to install userscripts (which are like "diet" extensions). It also enhances privacy and comes with an adblocker. [1] https://www.bromite.org/ https://www.bromite.org/
- emptyparadise 4y ago
  Safari on iOS has support for browser extensions, I think there are extensions for user scripts as well.
  - BrutalCoding 4y ago
    In that case I’d suggest having a look at Orion, its a webkit based browser just like Safari and it tries to be close to Safari. The big difference is that you can install all extensions from Chrome and from Firefox. Whether all extensions work is a different story but its very neat! Its available on MacOS and iOS, both supporting extensions. https://browser.kagi.com/ https://browser.kagi.com/
    - MandieD 4y ago
      I'm a Kagi subscriber and didn't know about Orion, so thanks for this!
  - NotPractical 4y ago
    Oh wow, I didn't know that! Kudos to Apple there.
OneLeggedCat 4y ago
> on an iphone I was so happy to discover this. Went and tried it on Firefox on iPhone... Nope. Apparently it works on all other browsers on iPhone. Just not Firefox. Sigh. I found that the bug report for doing javascript bookmarks was already filed years ago, and Mozilla just ignores it. Mozilla has a bizarre decision making structure.

svnpenn 4y ago

Yes, yes, yes! I am so sick of sites putting fixed top bar, and fixed side bars as well. Add "clever" bar animation in as well, and you get the awful UX we have today. Classic case of people inventing a problem to solve.

darepublic 4y ago
For some ui, fixed sidebar is fine imo. The headers that scroll down with you, on the other hand, can go extinct
- JoshTriplett 4y ago
  Fixed sidebar doesn't work well for mobile devices. A button to show them works, though.
  - darepublic 4y ago
    yes I mean on desktop. Original comment was something along the lines of all position fixed is bad, which I don't agree with. If it doesn't cause distress, doesn't distract the user, I don't take issue with it.
Kerrick 4y ago
It's not just the awful UX of today. It's the awful UX of yesteryear, except this time it's the website owner's fault. https://i.stack.imgur.com/pOAAU.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/pOAAU.jpg

ravenstine 4y ago

One of the banes of my existence! There's no place for these stupid effing banners when browsers have inertia scrolling and infinite-scrolling sites have fixed headers (or footers) visible all the time. Maybe I wouldn't be so frustrated if the tolerance for what makes a header reappear wasn't ~3px, which is what I often perceive it to be. It totally misunderstands human behavior, which isn't to read an article word by word all the way through like a robot but to reread things to better comprehend them and jump around an article to make sense of connected ideas.

panarky 4y ago
Also useful for nuking paywall overlays. Works great at The Atlantic, one click and you're in.
- charsi 4y ago
  Just disable javascript in ublock origin for the site and you don't have to even worry about clicking anything. Lots of news sites deliver the content and then try to block access to it using javascript.
  - panarky 4y ago
    You don't need uBo to block JavaScript, you can do that right in the browser. But often blocking JS means parts of the article don't display or the site breaks in other ways. Washington Post for example only shows blurry placeholder photos with JS off. The kill-sticky or the element zapper in uBo can sometimes do what blocking JS cannot.

gumby 4y ago

Or those stupid floating bars that cover the top of the screen, so when you press space to scroll a line or two is obscured. What are they thinking?

Lio 4y ago
I've heard them called "vanity flaps", which seems to describe them perfectly. I guess they're useful when the content is of low quality but you're desperate to keep eyes on the name of your site. I hate them. About the only thing worse than self-hiding vanity flap is a floating side bar using a slow animation to slide back into your field of view, just terrible.
- wruza 4y ago
  slow animation to slide back into your field of view I have a special section in my uBlock user rules, and it is full of annoyances like this. Another one is an element with popup on hover, but you can only close it by hover-unhover a popup itself. Fly across such element by accident and enjoy your semi-modal “no idea how to get rid of”-popup without even clicking anywhere.
wruza 4y ago
I believe this is a collective failure. First, developers praise the web/html/css ways to do things and want nothing more. Then they meet a complex layout problem (page-scrolling of an element which is partially covered) and find no solution, because they got what they wanted and nothing more. Nobody reports it as a bug or a FR, or it gets scrutinized as “Do we really need it? Here is a complex way to do that, incompatible with most designs, but doable, right?” and then gets closed as inactive, cause nothing adequate can be commented upon it. Developers develop selective blindness to very obvious layout bugs. The cycle repeats. So many hours spent on nothing when a simple `viewport-offset-{top,…}: 20px` could solve it once and for all. Instead we will support global nonsense described in the article for years, despite it stays nonsense at any angle.

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago

Why are front end developers like this?

dreamcompiler 4y ago
I suspect most of them are not like this. But their customer is not you; it's the website manager. And that manager gets promoted not by providing a great user experience but by shoving the company's name into your face as much as possible. (And also by maximizing conversions, ad clicks, and engagement. Oof. Writing that sentence makes me want to throw up.)
- wruza 4y ago
  It is okay and works as intended. The logical move is to fix the platform, which is obviously broken. Not to blame developers. If you have external rules which motivate people to do more X sacrificing Y, but your goal is more Y, make Y one-liner and only then they will follow Y at their workplaces. On a web scale everything becomes a market and you can’t regulate a market by “don’t do that because it’s bad”. They will never have enough time for that.
sethherr 4y ago
I'm an enthusiastic supporter of auto-hiding headers and have added them to sites. I don't understand the hate? It's easy to scroll back down again and have the header re-hide (ie overscroll when you see it happening and then scroll down). To me, this is better usability. I agree - fixed headers obscure the page and it's bad. But simultaneously, it's nice to be able to access the header and navigation instantly. This seems like a good compromise?
- KapKap55 4y ago
  How often do you really need to access the header and navigation "instantly"? In comparison, how often do you need to reread or verify information from a previous paragraph, or review a chart or graph you viewed earlier? It's fairly obvious which one is actually more important in the majority of cases and it's going to be the actual information you're currently reading through. Obscuring the actual content in any form is a direct reduction to page usability.

NotPractical 4y ago

Interesting that `javascript:` bookmarklets work on iPhones, given Apple's track record of locking everything down. Neat! Browser extensions are still notoriously difficult to get on mobile for some reason (even on Android, which is open source-ish). So far the best method I've found for injecting JS into sites on Android is the Bromite [1] browser, a Chromium fork that allows you to install userscripts (which are like "diet" extensions). It also enhances privacy and comes with an adblocker. [1] https://www.bromite.org/ https://www.bromite.org/

emptyparadise 4y ago
Safari on iOS has support for browser extensions, I think there are extensions for user scripts as well.
- BrutalCoding 4y ago
  In that case I’d suggest having a look at Orion, its a webkit based browser just like Safari and it tries to be close to Safari. The big difference is that you can install all extensions from Chrome and from Firefox. Whether all extensions work is a different story but its very neat! Its available on MacOS and iOS, both supporting extensions. https://browser.kagi.com/ https://browser.kagi.com/
  - MandieD 4y ago
    I'm a Kagi subscriber and didn't know about Orion, so thanks for this!
- NotPractical 4y ago
  Oh wow, I didn't know that! Kudos to Apple there.

OneLeggedCat 4y ago

> on an iphone I was so happy to discover this. Went and tried it on Firefox on iPhone... Nope. Apparently it works on all other browsers on iPhone. Just not Firefox. Sigh. I found that the bug report for doing javascript bookmarks was already filed years ago, and Mozilla just ignores it. Mozilla has a bizarre decision making structure.