6 ms·

Death to Scroll Fade

412 points by PaulHoule 8mo ago

yards 8mo ago
I raise you one. Death to the parallax scroll. In fact, death to all scroll animations.
- ryandrake 8mo ago
  Scrolling should just move a fixed size view up and down a fixed sized page. Why on earth must everyone complicate it so much?
  - marssaxman 8mo ago
    I don't understand why browsers ever let designers fuck up the scrolling mechanism in the first place. Why is that even possible?
    - ryandrake 8mo ago
      Browsers have handed way too much control to web developers. "The web as a software SDK" was a terrible idea.
      - mghackerlady 8mo ago
        The web should be a method of delivering documents exclusively, and be limited to the kinds of things you can do with other computerized documents (the basics, but also Audio, Video, Animations, hyperlinking, etc.)
        wtallis 8mo ago
        I'd be okay with locking these heavily-abused features behind a "web app mode" that the user has to enable on a per-site basis. It should include a restriction forcing all content to come from the same origin, so that the browser in that mode won't make it easy for web apps to include third-party tracking or advertising.
      - bigstrat2003 8mo ago
        My biggest annoyance: letting scripts control the history. I can imagine that someone thought "oh it'll be nice, you can use it for pages of an app". But the reality is that people are not nice and it gets used maliciously all the damn time. It should not be allowed.
- pier25 8mo ago
  Absolutely. I'm not against animations in UI design but these should be used purposefully to direct the user's attention on something or for minimal aesthetic effect. When everything is moving it's just like adding a ton of ketchup to everything.
- ivanjermakov 8mo ago
  Death to scroll event override in general. Messes up my vimium smooth scrolling.
- halapro 8mo ago
  Real parallax is fine if done well. A subtle image parallax looks great on some websites. If you're talking about "move any random element at different speed without rhyme or reason," then yeah, I agree with you. We all hate it.
hyperhello 8mo ago
It’s kind of like when someone wants you to read something, so they hold the thing to read for you and read it out loud, while moving their finger at the words they’re currently reading. I know how to read!!!
sgbeal 8mo ago
The poster seems to be implying that this effect is prevalent across the web, yet i'm seeing it for the very first time on that post. (And, indeed, it's annoying. My eyes can't read when there's animation going on nearby.) The goldfish animation along the bottom is epic and i will have to mine that bit for reuse somewhere :).
- ramon156 8mo ago
  I was redesigning a website of mine and Claude suggested to add this as an animation. My theory is that, if claude is confident in a suggestion, a lot of other people have done the same. Maybe it's too subtle to notice. Edit: on odeva.nl
  - chrismorgan 8mo ago
    The scroll fade on that site is comparatively inoffensive (comparatively), because you messed with scrolling itself, which is one of the worst things you can do, taking over and ruining inertia. You’re literally going out of your way to make things worse. The ONLY time scrolljacking of any kind is acceptable is for things like maps where there is no “normal”.
    - eru 8mo ago
      Or for a game, where it's part of the interface.
      - chrismorgan 8mo ago
        Got an example of what you mean? Because if you mean the only thing I can think of, I very strongly disagree.
        wtallis 8mo ago
        Hijacking native scroll behavior to badly reimplement anything remotely like scrolling is wrong even in a gaming context. But if you're implementing Half Life 2 in a browser, where the user no longer has a normal cursor, then hijacking scrolling to implement the weapon switcher is fine.
nicman23 8mo ago
do not the scroll i will umatrix you
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
xnx 8mo ago
It's amazing how web graphic designers don't realize 99% of all added motion/animation is just as annoying and unnecessary as <blink> and <marquee>.
- ToucanLoucan 8mo ago
  Oh they know, but it's requested because clients want a fancy website, and just having fucking text on the fucking screen explaining what you fucking sell is boooooring. And also completely functional and accessible but where's the fun in that?
  - thenthenthen 8mo ago
    Yep. And then complain how it’s not loading/stuttering. I guess we need a new website…
ryandrake 8mo ago
> This post purposefully ignores the reduced motion preference to give everyone the same truly terrible experience. I am sorry. Please use your browser’s reader mode. "Reader Mode" shouldn't even be a special mode. It should just be the default browsing experience, and users who want all this styling crap should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something.
- carlosjobim 8mo ago
  On MacOS and iOS you can set reader mode as default. You should set reader mode as default.
- apples_oranges 8mo ago
  what a good idea to have this automatically come up when the page opens, and perhaps give user a few seconds to press escape to get rid of it, if needed
  - carlosjobim 8mo ago
    Why just a few seconds? In reader mode you can press escape any time to close it.
- MoonWalk 8mo ago
  "should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something." Bwahahaha, +1! This reminds me of calling Windows XP's default motif "Fisher-Price" mode. Which, sadly, looks professional and efficient compared to Windows (and, increasingly, the Mac) today.
  - mghackerlady 8mo ago
    I actually think modern windows looks nice. It isn't nearly as good as the classic 9x look, but fluent obviously is a response to the visual shitshow that was 10
    - MoonWalk 8mo ago
sociopathai 8mo ago
[flagged]
sublinear 8mo ago
There are no bad animations, only bad designs. If you design the animation to be way over the top like this, and then design the page to use it on every line then of course it looks like shit. This is like arguing against any amount of sugar in food and then shoveling it into someone's mouth to try to prove your point. It's disingenuous and you aren't proving anything. I don't even think the top agreeing comments here are coming from web devs or the target users.
- kbelder 8mo ago
  If you sped this up, and minimized it to the point it was unnoticeable, it would not hurt the browsing experience. But that raises the question...
- wtallis 8mo ago
  Animations need to to serve a purpose. Fading in is justifiable when you're adding new content on top of existing content, and need to draw attention to the fact that something changed in that part of the screen. None of that applies in the case of fade-in during scrolling. The user is already scrolling, everything on screen is moving, and new content is already expected to be coming in to view at the bottom of the window. Adding animations on top of all of that doesn't help anything, and just distracts from and delays presentation of the content the user was already trying to reveal.
  - sublinear 8mo ago
    Scroll-fade does serve a purpose when used correctly, and others have posted real world examples of this already. It's so subtle that without them hardly anyone even knew what this blog post was ranting about. It's just a way to draw attention to text without solely relying on typeface modifiers. The real designs bring attention to what users are scrolling past as it flies by on the screen. That temporary urgency is why it's an animation. This is something that weight, height, underline, etc. cannot do as clearly. It's usually on the h-tags only, not every single line. That communicates the page structure too. It's clever and attractive when done right. It's not a new idea, and nobody was complaining about it until now.
cogman10 8mo ago
Really, almost any animation or hijacking on scrolling should be abolished. It's one of the most disgusting things to encounter on a webpage. I don't want your product to spin while I scroll down. I don't want animations or boxes to start appearing or disappearing. I don't want helpful tooltips, popups, or "I hope you enjoyed this" notifications to appear as I scroll. What I want when I scroll is for the page to move, either up or down, in a completely consistent manner. I want to be able to reasonably predict what I'll see as I go up or down. Apple loves this shit. Fortunately they aren't AS BAD as they once were, but you'll still encounter it on their product pages. https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/
- jevndev 8mo ago
  My least favorite by far is the “multi section” webpage design. Where the page is split into multiple whole-screen sections and scrolling the mouse wheel alternates between either moving between sections or playing the animations of that section. Yes please make my scroll wheel only sometimes actually scroll the page and other times rotate a graphic for way too long thanks
- alprado50 8mo ago
  Agree. I understand why people like those animations and sometimes even i want to implement these in my website with GSAP, but then i remember that these animations make my content harder to read.
- MoonWalk 8mo ago
  Another major pisser is sites that deliberately disable zooming on their mobile incarnations. WTF, WHY? My favorite was when Google imperiously declared that it would "punish" "non-mobile-friendly" sites in their search results... but then disabled zooming on its own pages.
levmiseri 8mo ago
I'm guilty of this as well. https://kraa.io/about https://kraa.io/about has some fade-in animation for the intro text – driven by wanting the initial impression to be focused/minimal and 'unravel' as you go. I take it that most HN folks would vastly prefer to NOT have this?
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- sublinear 8mo ago
  I think it looks fine except it's missing a more obvious hint that there's more to see when I scroll. The one that's there is just textual and very delayed.
  - medbar 8mo ago
    Not sure if I second this or not. I did want to scroll, but I don't know how much of that was influenced from the context or the extreme minimalism making me want to look for more - I'm interested in how I would have reacted to the site not knowing it had scroll fade. I could see an argument with the "Don't Make Me Think" principle.
- wincy 8mo ago
  I’ll say as someone who suffers from severe motion sickness and the OP site makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, that your site does the fade in fast enough that it doesn’t give me any discomfort. Seems fine to me. Maybe I should consider being a consultant for vestibular motion sickness accessibility, haha. I’d get paid to answer “on a scale of 1-10, how pukey does this app make you feel?”
marcosdumay 8mo ago
Gotta love the attention to detail at the end, that is illegible when selected too. It's not realistic, though. Illegible sites never get that detail right.
- kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
  They usually inhibit selection to protect their sacred text.
wincy 8mo ago
Hah, the point has certainly been made. Absolute Barf-o-Rama. I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness, which hasn’t really improved as an adult, and this page immediately made me feel like I’m going to throw up. Had to switch to reader mode after the first image. I was always the kid who couldn’t read in the car, and was always groggy on long road trips because of Dramamine (side note, Meclizine has significantly improved my life, as it has largely the same effect without drowsiness). As an adult I’m fine as long as I’m in the front seat, public transit is terrible for me. Elevators are tiny torture chambers, especially when stopping on multiple floors. And it’s cumulative, the sensation becomes worse the more I’m exposed to it over the course of a day (I have a mental “theme park budget” in my head of how many rides I can comfortably do!). VR can’t have any motion that isn’t firmly anchored to a sense of place (space ship/driving sims are okay though!) I’m glad awareness is being raised about this, but I’m curious what websites are using this now? Is it just personal blogs and the like right now? I definitely would have noticed this cropping up on websites I frequent.
- snozolli 8mo ago
  I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness I don't, and yet I am also feeling nauseated after reading that page! What a truly awful experience.
- freedomben 8mo ago
  > As an adult I’m fine as long as I’m in the front seat, public transit is terrible for me. Me too! The worst part about this is anytime there's more than two adults in the vehicle, the "front seat" has all sorts of social expectations and courtesies. I once mentioned that I get motion sick when not in the front seat, and I could tell that nobody believed me and thought it was an uncool way to try and guilt people into letting me monopolize the favored chair. After that I don't bother, but do try to avoid shared cars because in those I'll be quietly sitting in a torture chamber while others around me don't understand. Also, good God those drivers whould constantly gas-brake-gas-gas-brake-gas-brake-brake-gas. I get it when all the sudden traffic rapidly and unexpectedly slows down, but so many people seem to always be pressing at least one pedal, never coasting. It's torture
- rickydroll 8mo ago
realityfactchex 8mo ago
I thought this was going to be about iOS and how now (as of iOS 26) there is a "fade out" at the top of every web page (around the notch/top-edge area). When scrolling/reading a web page, it literally changes that section of the text so that it fades to gray. So, "everything scroll fades". I couldn't find a way to turn it off. Quite irritating, IMHO. EDITED TO ADD ELABORATION: The issue with iOS "scroll fade" text color in Safari near the top notch is that this makes that top-edge-text "dynamic" (changing) and thus "draws attention" to it visually, thus competing for eyeball attention when I am probably actually reading somewhere further down on the page. Also, I would still like to be able to glance up to the topmost visible text if wanted, without having to adjust to its different and less visible colors. Apple designers should know all this. Further, I'd say the page text color should probably by default respect what the web page designer configured it as, and not have the OS change that text color (unless the user gets fancy and requests an override with dark mode or whatever settings). This article's critique seems valid, too (more generically about "scroll fade" in interfaces, e.g. web pages, which seems to mostly be about items appearing gradually via motion). Personally, I see less of that these days, compared to making every page in an OS fade out where unnecessary.
- jerlam 8mo ago
  I turned on "Reduce Transparency", and instead of a fade, it turns the top and bottom sections of the screen into blank white space. My "edge to edge screen" iPhone now resembles the last generation of iPhones with home button from 2017.
  - nottorp 8mo ago
    It's that bad? How about they give us back small iPhones with 4" screens then and whoever wants the fade can imagine it outside the physical phone?
    - jerlam 8mo ago
      On my iPhone 13 Mini, the space dedicated to showing browser content is around 4.25" diagonal with the Safari fade, so we're not that far off.
charcircuit 8mo ago
This website has a slow and laggy implementation which unfairly shows off the effect.
netrap 8mo ago
Death to Scroll Bar size change!!!
msarnoff 8mo ago
Originally read the URL as “D-Bus Hell dot com” and was like… yup.
confounder 8mo ago
Amen. So cathartic to see someone publish the post I've been wanting to write for a while, and with a much better title. Also: I've noticed a new abuse recently of sites implementing scroll momentum on desktop — has anyone else seen this? I couldn't believe it, but there it was.
- wtallis 8mo ago
  Sites overriding scroll behavior to implement their own smooth scroll behavior with the wrong speed has been a thing for many years. It's a bit harder to notice if you're using a traditional mouse wheel, but is really easy to notice on a decent laptop touchpad. It's a inexcusable usability disaster.
Heer_J 8mo ago
[dead]
rc_mob 8mo ago
I wish this blog stopped the scroll fading after it made ita point. would have really hammered it home.
burningChrome 8mo ago
I've always been under the impression it was lazy loading the page to increase page loading times for content above the fold? At least this was why I started using it about 8 years ago. Its like anything though. I think people just thought it was a cool effect and so it wasn't about page speed any more, it was just about something people used to add some panache to their sites. Kind of like people who've been abusing modals for the last decade or so. lol
- MichaelDickens 8mo ago
  I'm not a web dev but if the goal is to improve load times, I'd think it would make more sense to load the full article text up front, and lazy load heavier data like images and video? I've seen a lot of websites that do it that way.
  - cwillu 8mo ago
    But then a fast reader might be able to read faster than the ads could load!
hedora 8mo ago
In reader mode on iOS 26, there is some scroll jank, presumably due to hidden scroll fade. (Take this as another excuse not to hijack scrolling behavior, not an actual request you improve your implementation of tacky-mode.)
sodapopcan 8mo ago
I'm someone who loves over-the-top, creative-for-the-sake-of-creative web design, even for something primarily text-based like a blog post, I 100% sympathize with and want to accommodate those who don't. I think `prefers-tacky` is a brilliant idea! It means excess decorative images could avoid even being downloaded if the user so chooses.
JnthnMyrs 8mo ago
[dead]
bingemaker 8mo ago
I worked for a client who was all about scrolljacking. Then he discovered parallax effect, and there was no looking back. He fired me, and got another team who didn't have any opinions. Now the page stutters on every device other than iPhone 16+ with 5G. :shrug:
xenadu02 8mo ago
Scrolling is broken by everyone everywhere. Scrolling to the bottom then forcing me to click "show more"? Lazy. A truly horrible experience. I don't know how anyone could think that is a good idea. The worst offenders are the ones showing me products. You might as well not have pages of products at all. Just tell me these 12 are the only ones you have because I've already lost interest. Not that most web stores are any good - most have no useful ability to search or browse so finding anything is like digging through a junk drawer. It all screams "we hate selling product, please go away". Next worst? Everything Google makes and all the fools who copied them: scroll down, scrolling hard stops, then a few seconds later the next segment of content loads. The scrollbar position is naught but lies. WHY??? Are you proud of that? Because you shouldn't be. You should be ashamed. Demand-load the content behind the scenes so scrolling is continuous and smooth. If the user scrolls fast then skip pages and/or cancel prior requests. The scrolling is the priority, lazy-load the content as needed... but for f*k sake don't do what Google does. The top worst: hijacking scrolling for any form of animation or to change direction. Absolutely horrid and I leave any webpage that does this out of spite. This just screams "I'M A DESIGNER, LOOK AT MEEEEE!!!!!". It is code equivalent of being "too clever", but for UX. If you don't want people to buy your product or signup for your service but instead be impressed by your ability to vomit out D-E-S-I-G-N then by all means proceed. Everyone is guilty of this, even those who should know better.
- SAI_Peregrinus 8mo ago
  I'll add having a floating header that covers the top portion of the page, and only appears when you scroll up. I like to read text in the top third of the page, then scroll down so the lines I'm reading are still in the top third of the page. With the height of my monitor that's the most comfortable position, this should usually be the case if following common ergonomic guidelines. If I scroll up, very often such a header will appear & cover the text I was trying to scroll up to read, so I have to scroll farther. Then it's visible, so I scroll down to move it back up to the top portion of the page as the header goes away. Lather, rinse, repeat, install a uBlock origin filter to get rid of floating headers.
- halapro 8mo ago
  You might want to take some time off the internet, I can smell your liver from here. The internet sucks, it always sucked, most people don't know how to do anything properly, trends ruin everything else. It's always going to suck, most things do. Time to take a chill pill and learn to live with it.
shevy-java 8mo ago
This is the modern day blinking HTML tag. I also hate infinite scrolling. I much prefer to have websites simple at all times. I understand that stylish means it must look good and elegant, but this often ends up annoying me to no ends. Without ublock origin I would go nuts. I use it more to get rid of HTML I don't want to see. All pop-ups and slide-ins for instance. These things should never ever happen. Any notification should happen differently, or not at all. Often it is "please donate to us" - I understand their use case, but how is this relevant to my use case?
liendolucas 8mo ago
I can only add another aberration that it just started to happen on my browsers without even updating or doing anything at all: I get the master volume raised, I mean not the YouTube volume, but the volume that is reported in my OS. I truly don't know how this is possible or how should I turn it off completely. There are some settings in Firefox but the ones I have tried do not work. This is one of the worst things I have seen in many years, along with all the other aberrations that are already spread on the net.
Night_Thastus 8mo ago
Something else scroll-related I personally hate: Sticky 'headers' that disappear when you scroll down, and appear when you scroll up. I hate them so much. It hurts my brain to see the stupid thing appear and disappear constantly if I scroll around a page. The worst part is you can't even zap them out of the way with something like uBlock, because then there's no header even when you're at the top of the page. >:( EDIT: Whoops, flipped the directions. Complaint still stands though.
- adventured 8mo ago
  Screen real-estate for legitimate content is often at a premium and then they go and steal some of that land with sticky headers and or footers. I occasionally run across mobile sites that use both at the same time, while throwing in ads here and there, it's an atrocious experience.
  - tylervigen 8mo ago
    Yes but then I think they should leave the header at the top of the page. If I need it I'll scroll all the way back up! Don't make it randomly re-appear and cover the text I wanted to see because I decided to re-read that last paragraph.
    - swiftcoder 8mo ago
      Especially since mobile browsers typically have a shortcut for scroll-all-the-way-to-the-top
- adito 8mo ago
  Oh. This. Tho I solved that with userstyles.
  - Griffinsauce 8mo ago
    Joke's on you, we implement all animations in JS
- 8mo ago
jeff_tyrrill 8mo ago
I feel like the scroll fade fad is misunderstanding layered on bugs, turtles all the way down. Once upon a time, developers implemented lazy loading of images, to save bandwidth. However, some developers implemented it poorly, waiting until the moment an image is scrolled on-screen to even start loading it, leading to a visible blip as you scroll. (The better way would be to load an additional pageful of images beyond the current scroll view, which would provide enough time to load before scrolling into view at least most of the time. However, this doesn't maximally save bandwidth and some developers don't make good tradeoffs between diminishing returns on saving bandwidth vs. visibly degraded UX.) Then, designers saw the blip-into-view effect, thought it was an intentional visual effect (rather than an artifact of poorly implemented lazy loading), but thought, oh, I'll fix it so it looks nice, with fading. And here we are with a dumb visual fad originating from a bug without realizing it was a bug.
- tylervigen 8mo ago
  ...is that really the story? It feels like these are two related, but different things.
  - jeff_tyrrill 8mo ago
    I haven't dug into the history to see if this is really how it happened. I'd actually feel better if it wasn't true but it's the thought that occurred to me when I noticed the scroll fade effect becoming popular.
  - saghm 8mo ago
    I'm not sure it's feasible to prove or disprove how this design trend started. I wouldn't be shocked if it was true, but I also wouldn't be shocked if it wasn't. I'd be more surprised if we ever found out for sure one way or another than about what the truth is.
- halapro 8mo ago
  If you opened any "web design awards" website you'd know how terribly wrong you are. People will animate the sh out of any element exclusively for you to go "wow". It does not go much deeper than that. Designers and developers spend weeks scrolling up and down completely disregarding content. It looks cool, nothing else matters.
hirako2000 8mo ago
What sucks with scroll fade is when it fades slower than one can read or scroll. Fading the entire content very fast, so fast that it's barely perceptible is actually better on the eyes. Blinking hurts. Fast changing contrast hurts. The fade is a natural effect I use everywhere almost. My eyes never complained, rather are grateful for the small effort it takes to get right
- wtallis 8mo ago
  The motion of the scrolling already ensures that the new content is revealed gradually. There's no need for a fade-in animation on top of that. It's just punishing the user for scrolling too fast.
Animats 8mo ago
This terrible idea is a parody of a good idea from game design - LOD cross-fade. When a distant object changes from a low level of detail representation to a higher one, or vice versa, the change is best done as a cross fade. The old one fades out to transparent, the new one fades in from transparent. This is done to hide the change, not as a creative effect. The human visual system is very sensitive to fast changes. But below half a second, smooth changes are not too noticeable. With this trick, plus a slight amount of distance haze, you can get away with quite low detail distant models. That's part of how GTA V does those long vistas efficiently. Here's a long drive around the GTA V world.[1] Watch how background objects change. Many distant background objects start out with very low detail. Watch power line towers, for example, which are very low detail until about 100m range. The cross-fade to a better model takes about a half second. Active players don't notice. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws_yYxUaWRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws_yYxUaWRE
- wtallis 8mo ago
  It works for games because the fade-in of distant objects happens long before the object in question becomes the focus of the user's attention. It cannot work well for scrolling a web page because getting to the new content is the entire reason the user is scrolling the page, so they're going to be looking right at it (and trying to read it) during the fade.
MDCore 8mo ago
I couldn't do the mandatory onboarding training at a job once because the course web app had heavy scroll fade, and I got nauseous after a few minutes. I tried every few hours for weeks. Eventually I said I couldn't do it. They had to print it out to pdf for me, and gave me a pass on the courses that were dependent on animation to work.
thorncorona 8mo ago
My favorite part of the iPhone 17 pro / ios26 combo is that it lags on any and everything that remotely touches the GPU like this website.
- thenthenthen 8mo ago
  No stutter on iPhone 12 18.5
  - thorncorona 8mo ago
    Next phone will be an android at this rate if Apple can’t solve this garbage
slopinthebag 8mo ago
As always with this stuff, it's only bad when you notice it. When it's done right you just think "That was a nicely designed page".
delbronski 8mo ago
Why do web animations get so much hate with the HN crowd? I think a website is similar to a painting. Some will make you dizzy by just looking at them, and others will be a minimalist dream. Don’t hate me HN, but I say keep messing with the scroll bar, keep making annoying blinking banners, have your way with scroll fade. Don’t listen to these web dev veterans, they are just like snobby movie critics!
- bigstrat2003 8mo ago
  They get hate because they are almost always annoying and distract from the actual content. Nobody cares how creative your web page design is if it sucks to use so badly that a plain text page would be better.
  - delbronski 8mo ago
    But do they really suck to use so badly? Like for real? The examples that have been listed in the comments (Apple and Claude sites) look totally fine to me. People here are talking about them like they are the worse websites ever.
    - wtallis 8mo ago
      Are you actually trying to use any of those sites to get something done, or are you just looking at them and evaluating them as a piece of modern art? Because if you're actually trying to figure out which laptop to buy, Apple's web site has a lot of crap that gets in the way.
      - delbronski 8mo ago
        I agree with you. Personally I hate it. I was trying to figure out the specs of this laptop because my sister asked me if she should buy it. I had to do a lot of clicking. But this site got my sister excited about buying the laptop. The stupid animations worked. And I am sure if this was presented to her as a simple html page with a white background and some text it just would not have had the same effect. Like it or not, most websites are just ads. Interactive billboards. They are not there to present data to you in the best way possible.
Boulos00191 8mo ago
[dead]
jjcm 8mo ago
There's a very simple fix I typically do when it comes to animations: animationCount = 0 animateElement(el) { el.animate({duration: BASE_DURATION / animationCount}) animationCount++ } (formula exagerated for simplicity) Essentially, for any animation that gets repeated, it should decrease in duration over time. This makes things impactful when they're first being displayed, but they very quickly approach an extremely minimal state, making things feel snappy.
rgbjoy 8mo ago
This is why I chose a fade-in reveal https://www.rgbjoy.com/ https://www.rgbjoy.com/
Illniyar 8mo ago
Looking at the main site, seems like it's branded as a "no AI frontend consultant". First time I'm seeing a "no AI" used to differentiate a work for hire. Can't say this wasn't obviously coming. Boutique hand-coded consultancies/software-houses are probably going to spring up a lot.
quchen 8mo ago
I used to use WikiTok [1] on my phone at times, but now they’ve introduced »words appear word by word« on the mobile version. Baffles me, why one would hide and gradually reveal any sort of content. It’s nauseating! [1]: https://www.wikitok.io/ https://www.wikitok.io/
LocalH 8mo ago
The HTML of that last paragraph sent me lmao
darkteflon 8mo ago
Oh yeah. Fucking hate this. Apple does it with their product pages. You have to swipe like crazy and it’s impossible to move past their pictures / animations to get to the next text block until they’ve decided that you’ve seen enough. Another one of those “this can’t have actually been used by anyone at Apple” things they seem to do so well recently.
Shuyusyz60 8mo ago
[flagged]
bartread 8mo ago
I mean, fine, I don’t love scrollfade either, and I realise this site is trying to prove a point but, FFS, most of the problems can be solved by forcing the scroll fade to complete in 100 - 300ms as opposed to some glacially slow multi-second pace. Like I say, I don’t love it, but when we create sites we all have control over animation durations and there’s enough UX guidance around response times to easily avoid it completely sucking. So the real problems isn’t scrollfade, it’s that - in the face of overwhelming data - it’s both mandated and implemented poorly by people with no taste. If you’re going to implement any animation of any kind at least do us all the bare minimum courtesy and take 5 minutes to do some research into what works and what doesn’t first.
realaliarain74 8mo ago
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andai 8mo ago
Bonus points when they offset the scrollbar 1px from the edge of the screen so you can't click on it easily. (If you're lucky enough that they've merely made it 3px wide instead of removing it altogether!)
andai 8mo ago
I thought scroll fade was going to be that thing where, while you scroll, a newsletter popup box slowly fades into view. (I got one on the next HN post I clicked after this one!)
davidliu847386 8mo ago
[flagged]
PhantomDaddyX98 8mo ago
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Simon6666141434 8mo ago
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codenighter 8mo ago
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nyseSRCL36 8mo ago
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412 points by PaulHoule 8mo ago

yards 8mo ago

I raise you one. Death to the parallax scroll. In fact, death to all scroll animations.

ryandrake 8mo ago
Scrolling should just move a fixed size view up and down a fixed sized page. Why on earth must everyone complicate it so much?
- marssaxman 8mo ago
  I don't understand why browsers ever let designers fuck up the scrolling mechanism in the first place. Why is that even possible?
  - ryandrake 8mo ago
    Browsers have handed way too much control to web developers. "The web as a software SDK" was a terrible idea.
    - mghackerlady 8mo ago
      The web should be a method of delivering documents exclusively, and be limited to the kinds of things you can do with other computerized documents (the basics, but also Audio, Video, Animations, hyperlinking, etc.)
      - wtallis 8mo ago
        I'd be okay with locking these heavily-abused features behind a "web app mode" that the user has to enable on a per-site basis. It should include a restriction forcing all content to come from the same origin, so that the browser in that mode won't make it easy for web apps to include third-party tracking or advertising.
    - bigstrat2003 8mo ago
      My biggest annoyance: letting scripts control the history. I can imagine that someone thought "oh it'll be nice, you can use it for pages of an app". But the reality is that people are not nice and it gets used maliciously all the damn time. It should not be allowed.
pier25 8mo ago
Absolutely. I'm not against animations in UI design but these should be used purposefully to direct the user's attention on something or for minimal aesthetic effect. When everything is moving it's just like adding a ton of ketchup to everything.
ivanjermakov 8mo ago
Death to scroll event override in general. Messes up my vimium smooth scrolling.
halapro 8mo ago
Real parallax is fine if done well. A subtle image parallax looks great on some websites. If you're talking about "move any random element at different speed without rhyme or reason," then yeah, I agree with you. We all hate it.

hyperhello 8mo ago

It’s kind of like when someone wants you to read something, so they hold the thing to read for you and read it out loud, while moving their finger at the words they’re currently reading. I know how to read!!!

sgbeal 8mo ago

The poster seems to be implying that this effect is prevalent across the web, yet i'm seeing it for the very first time on that post. (And, indeed, it's annoying. My eyes can't read when there's animation going on nearby.) The goldfish animation along the bottom is epic and i will have to mine that bit for reuse somewhere :).

ramon156 8mo ago
I was redesigning a website of mine and Claude suggested to add this as an animation. My theory is that, if claude is confident in a suggestion, a lot of other people have done the same. Maybe it's too subtle to notice. Edit: on odeva.nl
- chrismorgan 8mo ago
  The scroll fade on that site is comparatively inoffensive (comparatively), because you messed with scrolling itself, which is one of the worst things you can do, taking over and ruining inertia. You’re literally going out of your way to make things worse. The ONLY time scrolljacking of any kind is acceptable is for things like maps where there is no “normal”.
  - eru 8mo ago
    Or for a game, where it's part of the interface.
    - chrismorgan 8mo ago
      Got an example of what you mean? Because if you mean the only thing I can think of, I very strongly disagree.
      - wtallis 8mo ago
        Hijacking native scroll behavior to badly reimplement anything remotely like scrolling is wrong even in a gaming context. But if you're implementing Half Life 2 in a browser, where the user no longer has a normal cursor, then hijacking scrolling to implement the weapon switcher is fine.

nicman23 8mo ago

do not the scroll i will umatrix you

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

xnx 8mo ago

It's amazing how web graphic designers don't realize 99% of all added motion/animation is just as annoying and unnecessary as <blink> and <marquee>.

ToucanLoucan 8mo ago
Oh they know, but it's requested because clients want a fancy website, and just having fucking text on the fucking screen explaining what you fucking sell is boooooring. And also completely functional and accessible but where's the fun in that?
- thenthenthen 8mo ago
  Yep. And then complain how it’s not loading/stuttering. I guess we need a new website…

ryandrake 8mo ago

> This post purposefully ignores the reduced motion preference to give everyone the same truly terrible experience. I am sorry. Please use your browser’s reader mode. "Reader Mode" shouldn't even be a special mode. It should just be the default browsing experience, and users who want all this styling crap should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something.

carlosjobim 8mo ago
On MacOS and iOS you can set reader mode as default. You should set reader mode as default.
apples_oranges 8mo ago
what a good idea to have this automatically come up when the page opens, and perhaps give user a few seconds to press escape to get rid of it, if needed
- carlosjobim 8mo ago
  Why just a few seconds? In reader mode you can press escape any time to close it.
MoonWalk 8mo ago
"should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something." Bwahahaha, +1! This reminds me of calling Windows XP's default motif "Fisher-Price" mode. Which, sadly, looks professional and efficient compared to Windows (and, increasingly, the Mac) today.
- mghackerlady 8mo ago
  I actually think modern windows looks nice. It isn't nearly as good as the classic 9x look, but fluent obviously is a response to the visual shitshow that was 10
  - MoonWalk 8mo ago

sociopathai 8mo ago

[flagged]

sublinear 8mo ago

There are no bad animations, only bad designs. If you design the animation to be way over the top like this, and then design the page to use it on every line then of course it looks like shit. This is like arguing against any amount of sugar in food and then shoveling it into someone's mouth to try to prove your point. It's disingenuous and you aren't proving anything. I don't even think the top agreeing comments here are coming from web devs or the target users.

kbelder 8mo ago
If you sped this up, and minimized it to the point it was unnoticeable, it would not hurt the browsing experience. But that raises the question...
wtallis 8mo ago
Animations need to to serve a purpose. Fading in is justifiable when you're adding new content on top of existing content, and need to draw attention to the fact that something changed in that part of the screen. None of that applies in the case of fade-in during scrolling. The user is already scrolling, everything on screen is moving, and new content is already expected to be coming in to view at the bottom of the window. Adding animations on top of all of that doesn't help anything, and just distracts from and delays presentation of the content the user was already trying to reveal.
- sublinear 8mo ago
  Scroll-fade does serve a purpose when used correctly, and others have posted real world examples of this already. It's so subtle that without them hardly anyone even knew what this blog post was ranting about. It's just a way to draw attention to text without solely relying on typeface modifiers. The real designs bring attention to what users are scrolling past as it flies by on the screen. That temporary urgency is why it's an animation. This is something that weight, height, underline, etc. cannot do as clearly. It's usually on the h-tags only, not every single line. That communicates the page structure too. It's clever and attractive when done right. It's not a new idea, and nobody was complaining about it until now.

cogman10 8mo ago

Really, almost any animation or hijacking on scrolling should be abolished. It's one of the most disgusting things to encounter on a webpage. I don't want your product to spin while I scroll down. I don't want animations or boxes to start appearing or disappearing. I don't want helpful tooltips, popups, or "I hope you enjoyed this" notifications to appear as I scroll. What I want when I scroll is for the page to move, either up or down, in a completely consistent manner. I want to be able to reasonably predict what I'll see as I go up or down. Apple loves this shit. Fortunately they aren't AS BAD as they once were, but you'll still encounter it on their product pages. https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/

jevndev 8mo ago
My least favorite by far is the “multi section” webpage design. Where the page is split into multiple whole-screen sections and scrolling the mouse wheel alternates between either moving between sections or playing the animations of that section. Yes please make my scroll wheel only sometimes actually scroll the page and other times rotate a graphic for way too long thanks
alprado50 8mo ago
Agree. I understand why people like those animations and sometimes even i want to implement these in my website with GSAP, but then i remember that these animations make my content harder to read.
MoonWalk 8mo ago
Another major pisser is sites that deliberately disable zooming on their mobile incarnations. WTF, WHY? My favorite was when Google imperiously declared that it would "punish" "non-mobile-friendly" sites in their search results... but then disabled zooming on its own pages.

levmiseri 8mo ago

I'm guilty of this as well. https://kraa.io/about https://kraa.io/about has some fade-in animation for the intro text – driven by wanting the initial impression to be focused/minimal and 'unravel' as you go. I take it that most HN folks would vastly prefer to NOT have this?

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
sublinear 8mo ago
I think it looks fine except it's missing a more obvious hint that there's more to see when I scroll. The one that's there is just textual and very delayed.
- medbar 8mo ago
  Not sure if I second this or not. I did want to scroll, but I don't know how much of that was influenced from the context or the extreme minimalism making me want to look for more - I'm interested in how I would have reacted to the site not knowing it had scroll fade. I could see an argument with the "Don't Make Me Think" principle.
wincy 8mo ago
I’ll say as someone who suffers from severe motion sickness and the OP site makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, that your site does the fade in fast enough that it doesn’t give me any discomfort. Seems fine to me. Maybe I should consider being a consultant for vestibular motion sickness accessibility, haha. I’d get paid to answer “on a scale of 1-10, how pukey does this app make you feel?”

marcosdumay 8mo ago

Gotta love the attention to detail at the end, that is illegible when selected too. It's not realistic, though. Illegible sites never get that detail right.

kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
They usually inhibit selection to protect their sacred text.

wincy 8mo ago

Hah, the point has certainly been made. Absolute Barf-o-Rama. I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness, which hasn’t really improved as an adult, and this page immediately made me feel like I’m going to throw up. Had to switch to reader mode after the first image. I was always the kid who couldn’t read in the car, and was always groggy on long road trips because of Dramamine (side note, Meclizine has significantly improved my life, as it has largely the same effect without drowsiness). As an adult I’m fine as long as I’m in the front seat, public transit is terrible for me. Elevators are tiny torture chambers, especially when stopping on multiple floors. And it’s cumulative, the sensation becomes worse the more I’m exposed to it over the course of a day (I have a mental “theme park budget” in my head of how many rides I can comfortably do!). VR can’t have any motion that isn’t firmly anchored to a sense of place (space ship/driving sims are okay though!) I’m glad awareness is being raised about this, but I’m curious what websites are using this now? Is it just personal blogs and the like right now? I definitely would have noticed this cropping up on websites I frequent.

snozolli 8mo ago
I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness I don't, and yet I am also feeling nauseated after reading that page! What a truly awful experience.
freedomben 8mo ago
> As an adult I’m fine as long as I’m in the front seat, public transit is terrible for me. Me too! The worst part about this is anytime there's more than two adults in the vehicle, the "front seat" has all sorts of social expectations and courtesies. I once mentioned that I get motion sick when not in the front seat, and I could tell that nobody believed me and thought it was an uncool way to try and guilt people into letting me monopolize the favored chair. After that I don't bother, but do try to avoid shared cars because in those I'll be quietly sitting in a torture chamber while others around me don't understand. Also, good God those drivers whould constantly gas-brake-gas-gas-brake-gas-brake-brake-gas. I get it when all the sudden traffic rapidly and unexpectedly slows down, but so many people seem to always be pressing at least one pedal, never coasting. It's torture
rickydroll 8mo ago

realityfactchex 8mo ago

I thought this was going to be about iOS and how now (as of iOS 26) there is a "fade out" at the top of every web page (around the notch/top-edge area). When scrolling/reading a web page, it literally changes that section of the text so that it fades to gray. So, "everything scroll fades". I couldn't find a way to turn it off. Quite irritating, IMHO. EDITED TO ADD ELABORATION: The issue with iOS "scroll fade" text color in Safari near the top notch is that this makes that top-edge-text "dynamic" (changing) and thus "draws attention" to it visually, thus competing for eyeball attention when I am probably actually reading somewhere further down on the page. Also, I would still like to be able to glance up to the topmost visible text if wanted, without having to adjust to its different and less visible colors. Apple designers should know all this. Further, I'd say the page text color should probably by default respect what the web page designer configured it as, and not have the OS change that text color (unless the user gets fancy and requests an override with dark mode or whatever settings). This article's critique seems valid, too (more generically about "scroll fade" in interfaces, e.g. web pages, which seems to mostly be about items appearing gradually via motion). Personally, I see less of that these days, compared to making every page in an OS fade out where unnecessary.

jerlam 8mo ago
I turned on "Reduce Transparency", and instead of a fade, it turns the top and bottom sections of the screen into blank white space. My "edge to edge screen" iPhone now resembles the last generation of iPhones with home button from 2017.
- nottorp 8mo ago
  It's that bad? How about they give us back small iPhones with 4" screens then and whoever wants the fade can imagine it outside the physical phone?
  - jerlam 8mo ago
    On my iPhone 13 Mini, the space dedicated to showing browser content is around 4.25" diagonal with the Safari fade, so we're not that far off.

charcircuit 8mo ago

This website has a slow and laggy implementation which unfairly shows off the effect.

netrap 8mo ago

Death to Scroll Bar size change!!!

msarnoff 8mo ago

Originally read the URL as “D-Bus Hell dot com” and was like… yup.

confounder 8mo ago

Amen. So cathartic to see someone publish the post I've been wanting to write for a while, and with a much better title. Also: I've noticed a new abuse recently of sites implementing scroll momentum on desktop — has anyone else seen this? I couldn't believe it, but there it was.

wtallis 8mo ago
Sites overriding scroll behavior to implement their own smooth scroll behavior with the wrong speed has been a thing for many years. It's a bit harder to notice if you're using a traditional mouse wheel, but is really easy to notice on a decent laptop touchpad. It's a inexcusable usability disaster.

Heer_J 8mo ago

[dead]

rc_mob 8mo ago

I wish this blog stopped the scroll fading after it made ita point. would have really hammered it home.

burningChrome 8mo ago

I've always been under the impression it was lazy loading the page to increase page loading times for content above the fold? At least this was why I started using it about 8 years ago. Its like anything though. I think people just thought it was a cool effect and so it wasn't about page speed any more, it was just about something people used to add some panache to their sites. Kind of like people who've been abusing modals for the last decade or so. lol

MichaelDickens 8mo ago
I'm not a web dev but if the goal is to improve load times, I'd think it would make more sense to load the full article text up front, and lazy load heavier data like images and video? I've seen a lot of websites that do it that way.
- cwillu 8mo ago
  But then a fast reader might be able to read faster than the ads could load!

hedora 8mo ago

In reader mode on iOS 26, there is some scroll jank, presumably due to hidden scroll fade. (Take this as another excuse not to hijack scrolling behavior, not an actual request you improve your implementation of tacky-mode.)

sodapopcan 8mo ago

I'm someone who loves over-the-top, creative-for-the-sake-of-creative web design, even for something primarily text-based like a blog post, I 100% sympathize with and want to accommodate those who don't. I think `prefers-tacky` is a brilliant idea! It means excess decorative images could avoid even being downloaded if the user so chooses.

JnthnMyrs 8mo ago

[dead]

bingemaker 8mo ago

I worked for a client who was all about scrolljacking. Then he discovered parallax effect, and there was no looking back. He fired me, and got another team who didn't have any opinions. Now the page stutters on every device other than iPhone 16+ with 5G. :shrug:

xenadu02 8mo ago

Scrolling is broken by everyone everywhere. Scrolling to the bottom then forcing me to click "show more"? Lazy. A truly horrible experience. I don't know how anyone could think that is a good idea. The worst offenders are the ones showing me products. You might as well not have pages of products at all. Just tell me these 12 are the only ones you have because I've already lost interest. Not that most web stores are any good - most have no useful ability to search or browse so finding anything is like digging through a junk drawer. It all screams "we hate selling product, please go away". Next worst? Everything Google makes and all the fools who copied them: scroll down, scrolling hard stops, then a few seconds later the next segment of content loads. The scrollbar position is naught but lies. WHY??? Are you proud of that? Because you shouldn't be. You should be ashamed. Demand-load the content behind the scenes so scrolling is continuous and smooth. If the user scrolls fast then skip pages and/or cancel prior requests. The scrolling is the priority, lazy-load the content as needed... but for f*k sake don't do what Google does. The top worst: hijacking scrolling for any form of animation or to change direction. Absolutely horrid and I leave any webpage that does this out of spite. This just screams "I'M A DESIGNER, LOOK AT MEEEEE!!!!!". It is code equivalent of being "too clever", but for UX. If you don't want people to buy your product or signup for your service but instead be impressed by your ability to vomit out D-E-S-I-G-N then by all means proceed. Everyone is guilty of this, even those who should know better.

SAI_Peregrinus 8mo ago
I'll add having a floating header that covers the top portion of the page, and only appears when you scroll up. I like to read text in the top third of the page, then scroll down so the lines I'm reading are still in the top third of the page. With the height of my monitor that's the most comfortable position, this should usually be the case if following common ergonomic guidelines. If I scroll up, very often such a header will appear & cover the text I was trying to scroll up to read, so I have to scroll farther. Then it's visible, so I scroll down to move it back up to the top portion of the page as the header goes away. Lather, rinse, repeat, install a uBlock origin filter to get rid of floating headers.
halapro 8mo ago
You might want to take some time off the internet, I can smell your liver from here. The internet sucks, it always sucked, most people don't know how to do anything properly, trends ruin everything else. It's always going to suck, most things do. Time to take a chill pill and learn to live with it.

shevy-java 8mo ago

This is the modern day blinking HTML tag. I also hate infinite scrolling. I much prefer to have websites simple at all times. I understand that stylish means it must look good and elegant, but this often ends up annoying me to no ends. Without ublock origin I would go nuts. I use it more to get rid of HTML I don't want to see. All pop-ups and slide-ins for instance. These things should never ever happen. Any notification should happen differently, or not at all. Often it is "please donate to us" - I understand their use case, but how is this relevant to my use case?

liendolucas 8mo ago

I can only add another aberration that it just started to happen on my browsers without even updating or doing anything at all: I get the master volume raised, I mean not the YouTube volume, but the volume that is reported in my OS. I truly don't know how this is possible or how should I turn it off completely. There are some settings in Firefox but the ones I have tried do not work. This is one of the worst things I have seen in many years, along with all the other aberrations that are already spread on the net.

Night_Thastus 8mo ago

Something else scroll-related I personally hate: Sticky 'headers' that disappear when you scroll down, and appear when you scroll up. I hate them so much. It hurts my brain to see the stupid thing appear and disappear constantly if I scroll around a page. The worst part is you can't even zap them out of the way with something like uBlock, because then there's no header even when you're at the top of the page. >:( EDIT: Whoops, flipped the directions. Complaint still stands though.

adventured 8mo ago
Screen real-estate for legitimate content is often at a premium and then they go and steal some of that land with sticky headers and or footers. I occasionally run across mobile sites that use both at the same time, while throwing in ads here and there, it's an atrocious experience.
- tylervigen 8mo ago
  Yes but then I think they should leave the header at the top of the page. If I need it I'll scroll all the way back up! Don't make it randomly re-appear and cover the text I wanted to see because I decided to re-read that last paragraph.
  - swiftcoder 8mo ago
    Especially since mobile browsers typically have a shortcut for scroll-all-the-way-to-the-top
adito 8mo ago
Oh. This. Tho I solved that with userstyles.
- Griffinsauce 8mo ago
  Joke's on you, we implement all animations in JS
8mo ago

jeff_tyrrill 8mo ago

I feel like the scroll fade fad is misunderstanding layered on bugs, turtles all the way down. Once upon a time, developers implemented lazy loading of images, to save bandwidth. However, some developers implemented it poorly, waiting until the moment an image is scrolled on-screen to even start loading it, leading to a visible blip as you scroll. (The better way would be to load an additional pageful of images beyond the current scroll view, which would provide enough time to load before scrolling into view at least most of the time. However, this doesn't maximally save bandwidth and some developers don't make good tradeoffs between diminishing returns on saving bandwidth vs. visibly degraded UX.) Then, designers saw the blip-into-view effect, thought it was an intentional visual effect (rather than an artifact of poorly implemented lazy loading), but thought, oh, I'll fix it so it looks nice, with fading. And here we are with a dumb visual fad originating from a bug without realizing it was a bug.

tylervigen 8mo ago
...is that really the story? It feels like these are two related, but different things.
- jeff_tyrrill 8mo ago
  I haven't dug into the history to see if this is really how it happened. I'd actually feel better if it wasn't true but it's the thought that occurred to me when I noticed the scroll fade effect becoming popular.
- saghm 8mo ago
  I'm not sure it's feasible to prove or disprove how this design trend started. I wouldn't be shocked if it was true, but I also wouldn't be shocked if it wasn't. I'd be more surprised if we ever found out for sure one way or another than about what the truth is.
halapro 8mo ago
If you opened any "web design awards" website you'd know how terribly wrong you are. People will animate the sh out of any element exclusively for you to go "wow". It does not go much deeper than that. Designers and developers spend weeks scrolling up and down completely disregarding content. It looks cool, nothing else matters.

hirako2000 8mo ago

What sucks with scroll fade is when it fades slower than one can read or scroll. Fading the entire content very fast, so fast that it's barely perceptible is actually better on the eyes. Blinking hurts. Fast changing contrast hurts. The fade is a natural effect I use everywhere almost. My eyes never complained, rather are grateful for the small effort it takes to get right

wtallis 8mo ago
The motion of the scrolling already ensures that the new content is revealed gradually. There's no need for a fade-in animation on top of that. It's just punishing the user for scrolling too fast.

Animats 8mo ago

This terrible idea is a parody of a good idea from game design - LOD cross-fade. When a distant object changes from a low level of detail representation to a higher one, or vice versa, the change is best done as a cross fade. The old one fades out to transparent, the new one fades in from transparent. This is done to hide the change, not as a creative effect. The human visual system is very sensitive to fast changes. But below half a second, smooth changes are not too noticeable. With this trick, plus a slight amount of distance haze, you can get away with quite low detail distant models. That's part of how GTA V does those long vistas efficiently. Here's a long drive around the GTA V world.[1] Watch how background objects change. Many distant background objects start out with very low detail. Watch power line towers, for example, which are very low detail until about 100m range. The cross-fade to a better model takes about a half second. Active players don't notice. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws_yYxUaWRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws_yYxUaWRE

wtallis 8mo ago
It works for games because the fade-in of distant objects happens long before the object in question becomes the focus of the user's attention. It cannot work well for scrolling a web page because getting to the new content is the entire reason the user is scrolling the page, so they're going to be looking right at it (and trying to read it) during the fade.

MDCore 8mo ago

I couldn't do the mandatory onboarding training at a job once because the course web app had heavy scroll fade, and I got nauseous after a few minutes. I tried every few hours for weeks. Eventually I said I couldn't do it. They had to print it out to pdf for me, and gave me a pass on the courses that were dependent on animation to work.

thorncorona 8mo ago

My favorite part of the iPhone 17 pro / ios26 combo is that it lags on any and everything that remotely touches the GPU like this website.

thenthenthen 8mo ago
No stutter on iPhone 12 18.5
- thorncorona 8mo ago
  Next phone will be an android at this rate if Apple can’t solve this garbage

slopinthebag 8mo ago

As always with this stuff, it's only bad when you notice it. When it's done right you just think "That was a nicely designed page".

delbronski 8mo ago

Why do web animations get so much hate with the HN crowd? I think a website is similar to a painting. Some will make you dizzy by just looking at them, and others will be a minimalist dream. Don’t hate me HN, but I say keep messing with the scroll bar, keep making annoying blinking banners, have your way with scroll fade. Don’t listen to these web dev veterans, they are just like snobby movie critics!

bigstrat2003 8mo ago
They get hate because they are almost always annoying and distract from the actual content. Nobody cares how creative your web page design is if it sucks to use so badly that a plain text page would be better.
- delbronski 8mo ago
  But do they really suck to use so badly? Like for real? The examples that have been listed in the comments (Apple and Claude sites) look totally fine to me. People here are talking about them like they are the worse websites ever.
  - wtallis 8mo ago
    Are you actually trying to use any of those sites to get something done, or are you just looking at them and evaluating them as a piece of modern art? Because if you're actually trying to figure out which laptop to buy, Apple's web site has a lot of crap that gets in the way.
    - delbronski 8mo ago
      I agree with you. Personally I hate it. I was trying to figure out the specs of this laptop because my sister asked me if she should buy it. I had to do a lot of clicking. But this site got my sister excited about buying the laptop. The stupid animations worked. And I am sure if this was presented to her as a simple html page with a white background and some text it just would not have had the same effect. Like it or not, most websites are just ads. Interactive billboards. They are not there to present data to you in the best way possible.

Boulos00191 8mo ago

[dead]

jjcm 8mo ago

There's a very simple fix I typically do when it comes to animations: animationCount = 0 animateElement(el) { el.animate({duration: BASE_DURATION / animationCount}) animationCount++ } (formula exagerated for simplicity) Essentially, for any animation that gets repeated, it should decrease in duration over time. This makes things impactful when they're first being displayed, but they very quickly approach an extremely minimal state, making things feel snappy.

rgbjoy 8mo ago

This is why I chose a fade-in reveal https://www.rgbjoy.com/ https://www.rgbjoy.com/

Illniyar 8mo ago

Looking at the main site, seems like it's branded as a "no AI frontend consultant". First time I'm seeing a "no AI" used to differentiate a work for hire. Can't say this wasn't obviously coming. Boutique hand-coded consultancies/software-houses are probably going to spring up a lot.

quchen 8mo ago

I used to use WikiTok [1] on my phone at times, but now they’ve introduced »words appear word by word« on the mobile version. Baffles me, why one would hide and gradually reveal any sort of content. It’s nauseating! [1]: https://www.wikitok.io/ https://www.wikitok.io/

LocalH 8mo ago

The HTML of that last paragraph sent me lmao

darkteflon 8mo ago

Oh yeah. Fucking hate this. Apple does it with their product pages. You have to swipe like crazy and it’s impossible to move past their pictures / animations to get to the next text block until they’ve decided that you’ve seen enough. Another one of those “this can’t have actually been used by anyone at Apple” things they seem to do so well recently.

Shuyusyz60 8mo ago

[flagged]

bartread 8mo ago

I mean, fine, I don’t love scrollfade either, and I realise this site is trying to prove a point but, FFS, most of the problems can be solved by forcing the scroll fade to complete in 100 - 300ms as opposed to some glacially slow multi-second pace. Like I say, I don’t love it, but when we create sites we all have control over animation durations and there’s enough UX guidance around response times to easily avoid it completely sucking. So the real problems isn’t scrollfade, it’s that - in the face of overwhelming data - it’s both mandated and implemented poorly by people with no taste. If you’re going to implement any animation of any kind at least do us all the bare minimum courtesy and take 5 minutes to do some research into what works and what doesn’t first.

realaliarain74 8mo ago

[dead]

andai 8mo ago

Bonus points when they offset the scrollbar 1px from the edge of the screen so you can't click on it easily. (If you're lucky enough that they've merely made it 3px wide instead of removing it altogether!)

andai 8mo ago

I thought scroll fade was going to be that thing where, while you scroll, a newsletter popup box slowly fades into view. (I got one on the next HN post I clicked after this one!)

davidliu847386 8mo ago

[flagged]

PhantomDaddyX98 8mo ago

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