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Many of these suggestions are good. (I should make my subheds clickable!) But a couple of them, oh dear… I really hate progress bars, they are incredibly distr

• elric 2y ago
  I think progress bars are a logical consequence of the user-hostile shrinking of the scrollbar. Unusable, narrow things which are often hidden by default, and rarely have a visible elevator (or thumb) anymore. Of course, scrollbars are often entirely useless in pages which insist on loading content piecemeal -- another user hostile pattern.
  • gessha 2y ago
    To add to this, pages sometimes have comments or footers or other bells and whistles after the content that I’m interested in and it makes me think the post is longer than it is. This leads me to either leave the post for later or straight up close it because it’s too long.
    • mschuster91 2y ago
      > To add to this, pages sometimes have comments or footers or other bells and whistles after the content that I’m interested in Or, especially in news sites, Taboola and other bottom feeder trash.
      • dredmorbius 2y ago
        uBlock Origin's element blocker is ideal for removing those. You can define global rules for anything from Taboola, Outbrain, RevContent, etc., and never see them again. "Sharedaddy" is another element to nuke (social link litter crap).
      • account42 2y ago
        In those cases closing the page is the best solution anyway.
  • pc86 2y ago
    Whether or not either of these is user-hostile is up to interpretation and preference, but you're stating it as if it is objective fact. You see user-hostile shrinking of the scrollbar, someone else sees more room for content and hiding something that isn't necessary until you need it. You see loading content piecemeal as hostile, someone else sees blocking that 1kb of text from being displayed while you do more network-intensive work as hostile.
    • layer8 2y ago
      Regarding scrollbars, it’s user-hostile if the user can’t control it according to their preference.
      • pc86 2y ago
        What can't you do on a scrollbar today that you could 10/20/30 years ago?
        • layer8 2y ago
          The problem is either (a) the scrollbar is hidden and the software doesn't allow to make it visible always or (b) the web page assumes there is no visible scrollbar (or, (c), only a "see-through" overlay scrollbar) even if there is one. For additional aspects and details I refer you to these threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=scrollbar&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
        • apitman 2y ago
          See it
  • WorldMaker 2y ago
    Most of these progress bars are as thin as the native scrollbars have gotten (or thinner). If these are solely a consequence to the shrinking of the scrollbar, you'd imagine that they'd actually be bigger. I think that's a large contributing factor, but either most implementations are are as deficient [0] as what they are trying to augment or there are other things at play here. (Branding since websites haven't been able to consistently style browser scrollbars since the IE/early Firefox era; as the other comment points out, trying to counterbalance how long pages have gotten with "after-content" such as ads and comments and recommended articles and "infinite scroll" to more articles.) [0] Or arguably worse deficient: Most of them seem to have no real accessibility themselves and are opaque to things like screen readers. Even if modern scroll bars are hidden by default and woefully tiny visually by default, they still have decades of accessibility baked in and accessible options (if you can find them).
  • dredmorbius 2y ago
    Obvious solution is obvious: restore the fucking scrollbar. I suspect a strong driver of scrollbar deprecation is the overwhelming dominance of small-screen touch-based mobile devices. An active scrollbar, that is, one which not only shows page scroll depth, but controls it via touch, is one more UI element to generate annoying behaviours given the already perilous state of touch-based UIs. (The inability to correctly distinguish tap vs. drag or scroll actions is one that's driven me to distraction for well over a decade.) Unfortunately, what's at least arguable on mobile becomes the trendy fashion on desktop, which is just fucking stupid.
    • scott_w 2y ago
      To be fair, the designer of the website can’t restore scrollbars…
      • p_l 2y ago
        ... not exactly. It's possible to essentially reimplement the logic of how scrollbars look, where they are, and when they appear, in just CSS on modern browsers. Ended up having to do part of that once because it was easier at the time than to figure out just why a mismatched browser scrollbar would show up due to complex layouting issue (in embedded world, so we didn't actually have to worry about end user preference there, otherwise I wouldn't dare use such a hack)
        • scott_w 2y ago
          Yes, that’s true but I suspect that what you’re doing is also what people are complaining about ;-)
          • p_l 2y ago
            There's a reason why I included "I wouldn't dare" if it was a normal website :D Especially since in our case I essentially deleted the scrollbar.
          • dredmorbius 2y ago
• dahauns 2y ago
  >I really hate progress bars, they are incredibly distracting. One of the worst examples of front end programmers wasting their time reimplementing browser functions badly. I already have scroll bars! I do not need more scroll bars! And the icing on the cake - as demonstrated in the quanta link - is the horizontal rendering in combination with a generous sticky wasting precious space I'd rather use for, well reading content.
• digging 2y ago
  > I really hate progress bars, they are incredibly distracting. One of the worst examples of front end programmers wasting their time reimplementing browser functions badly. I already have scroll bars! I do not need more scroll bars! This is addressed though in the following paragraph (indirectly), where a table of contents is rendered on the side. (Similar is a minimap, which I like for code or complex articles, but not for long text-heavy articles.) Maybe you also hate that, but it actually serves a purpose that scrollbar can never replicate and is much more useful than a scrollbar for many people.
• 0verkilled 2y ago
  +1 on finding progress bars distracting. I personally feel like they also "hurry" you into reading faster. If I see a progress bar, my first instinct is to try to finish as quickly as possible, even if that means a poorer understanding of the text.
• jonahx 2y ago
  To be fair, the author notes this and offers an alternative: > One immediate thought is that this is completely superseded by the regular browser scroll bar that’s ever-present at the side of the page. However, the scroll bar could be deceiving. If your page has a comments section, the comments could make the page look dauntingly long. Similarly, references to other pages and general “footer material” count towards the scroll bar, but would not count towards the progress bar. > Combining the two, you could imagine an always-visible table of contents that highlights the current section you’re in. With such a feature, you can always see where you are (including a rough estimate of how far into the page you’ve scrolled), and at the same time see how the current section integrates into the broader structure.
  • crazygringo 2y ago
    Exactly this. When you're reading different news sites, you never have any idea which sites load hundreds of comments at the bottom and which don't. What you think is a long article actually turns out to be 80% comments by page length. The same thing happens with books that include references at the end — a print book can be 20% endnotes. I've even encountered bizarre EPUB's where for some incomprehensible reason there's a page break between each endnote, so the actual content of the book ends somewhere around the 5% mark of total page count. I actually really appreciate a super-thin (2px) progress bar in the header. I don't like an always-visible table of contents because I find it really distracting. But I really like the way Wikipedia does it in their app, where it's a single tap to reveal the table of contents full-screen, centered on and highlighting your current section.
    • antihero 2y ago
      Personally I just look but I see the value of very subtle scrollbar.
  • zzo38computer 2y ago
    That is a relevant point, although still it shouldn't be necessary; proper semantic HTML commands should allow the browser to handle it automatically (in the way subject to user preferences), e.g. the <ARTICLE> command can be used if you want to delimit the article from the comments, and with commands such as <H1>, <H2>, etc you can delimit sections and automatically make a table of contents.
• FullGarden_S 2y ago
  I think horizontal progress bars are annoying but I think I'm fine with vertical progress bar to the side on heading navigation, highlighting the currently reading sub-heading.
• gnicholas 2y ago
  Funny, I quite like progress bars! I agree that they can be too bold at times, but it's nice to have a visual indicator since scroll bars have disappeared (especially on mobile).
• verelo 2y ago
  I'm with you. This was one of the least readable websites I've used in a while...I like some of these ideas, but many i actively dislike.
• throwaway894345 2y ago
  > I really hate progress bars, they are incredibly distracting. One of the worst examples of front end programmers wasting their time reimplementing browser functions badly. I already have scroll bars! I do not need more scroll bars! I'm just really glad that we seem to have mostly moved past headers that expand down in front of the content you're trying to read as you scroll down the screen. I can't think of a single justifiable reason for this behavior, but it was all the rage for a while. Also, I suspect the progress bars resurged because browsers became enamored with invisible or barely-visible scroll bars.
• ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  A less distracting version of the scrollbar might be a progress marker beside the text at 25% progress increments.
• ssahoo 2y ago
  This may be controversial, but i the blame browsers for letting them hijack the scrollbar. it should not a feature.
  • account42 2y ago
    Right, knowing the scroll position makes no sense for websites - it's yet another feature added for apps which should really have been declared out of scope of webbrowsers.
• fluffery 2y ago
  I know my website doesn't need progress bars, its bare html, no javascript, no php, no need for it