11 ms·

The Scroll Up Bar

192 points by muloka 12y ago

pfalke 12y ago
Worse than taking up screen space, these bars often exhibit laggy scrolling behavior and cause other UI bugs. There are very few well working implementations of such fixed bars, partly due to difficulties like the position:fixed implementation in Mobile Safari[0] - unless that has been changed in iOS7. I highly recommend to refrain from using position:fixed on mobile devices. [0] http://remysharp.com/2012/05/24/issues-with-position-fixed-scrolling-on-ios/ http://remysharp.com/2012/05/24/issues-with-position-fixed-s...
- badman_ting 12y ago
  Mobile web moves too quickly to care about what was true 2 entire years ago :) iOS got position: fixed a couple versions back, and iOS users upgrade rapidly. So, the advice not to use position: fixed on mobile may still be good, but iOS isn't the reason why.
lnanek2 12y ago
I was all ready to complain that I want some sort of nav/menu thing always stuck at the top, but I'm actually OK with the solution presented where it just shows as soon as you scroll up without having to scroll all the way.
- jrajav 12y ago
  This is exactly how Chrome for Android works with its toolbar and I think it works very nicely.
jasonkostempski 12y ago
I don't know if Android has the feature where you just tap the status bar to scroll to top but iOS does. With that feature I'd rather nav bars just stay at the top of the page, I'll just tap the status bar if I need to get back up there, which is almost never anyway.
- jrajav 12y ago
  Android doesn't have that by default, you need an app for it, and I'm pretty sure you also need to be rooted. Definitely not something you can depend on users having.
dmalik 12y ago
I was hoping to read about a usability study done when I clicked the link. I do agree for blogs and articles but for web apps I'm not sold.
- dj-wonk 12y ago
  Right. Breadcrumbs and/or nav bars on apps are nice.
  - hiphopyo 12y ago
    Indeed: http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/33071/are-breadcrumbs-still-in http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/33071/are-breadcrumbs-...
- hiphopyo 12y ago
  There's one in the works over here: http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/57990/how-usable-are-scroll-up-bars http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/57990/how-usable-are-s...
JamisonM 12y ago
The thing about this is that there is, as far as I can tell, no good solution for the fact that it can take a long, long time to return to the top of a page with a lot of text on a mobile device. If I read 3/4 of a lengthy story on my phone and I want to navigate somewhere else on the same website my only practical option is to revisit the main page of the site and start navigating from there. Do any mobile browsers have a "return to top of page" function? My keyboard has a "Home" key, my phone does not.
- micampe 12y ago
  I don't know what mobile phone you use, but on iOS tapping the status bar scrolls back to the top of the page (or anything else that scrolls in the system).
  - farmdawgnation 12y ago
    Aside: Is there a way to detect that happening in JavaScript? Just thinking that detecting the user doing that and then showing the site's nav bar again would be groovy...
    - micampe 12y ago
      I don't know, but I don't think it's wise to override a system behavior in ways the user doesn't expect. Better just put a button on the page.
    - nilved 12y ago
      Yes, onscroll
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- hrvbr 12y ago
  In Safari Mobile, tapping the top of the screen brings you back to the top of the page.
- 12y ago
lobo_tuerto 12y ago
The solution presented there is the same used by Google Chrome on Android, it might surprise a totally new user, but one gets used to it pretty fast. Seems like it's the best solution all around.
dj-wonk 12y ago
"Creeper" nav bars (an appropriate term, I think) are partly a consequence of mobile devices not letting you instantly jump to the top of a page. Mobile devices should offer a snappy, intuitive way to jump to the top or bottom of a page.
- avel 12y ago
  Opera on mobile had an awesome implementation of "jump to top": You scroll upwards twice or just quickly enough, and if you still have a long way to go, a button pops up for scrolling automatically to the top. I wish this was implemented universally in Android. http://lifehacker.com/5784500/opera-mobile-11-is-a-zippy-browser-for-android-and-symbian-phones http://lifehacker.com/5784500/opera-mobile-11-is-a-zippy-bro...
- ajanuary 12y ago
  You can jump to the top of most native iOS scrollable content, including web content in Mobile Safari, by tapping the system bar at the top of the screen
xux 12y ago
For me, the ideal solution is just get rid of the fixed bar, and have a clickable menu drop down. I don't want a page to analyze every of my behaviors and try to predict what I want to do. Sometimes I just like to scroll up and down to look for stuff, and I don't want some bar flashing in and out.
- derwildemomo 12y ago
  Well, you must have missed the discussion a few days ago about the evilness of the hamburger button. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7794505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7794505 The main argument against using a menu-button is that it hides the contents behind it, which makes them hard to discover and interact with.
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
pera 12y ago
I don't get why these bars are being used everywhere, personally I find them annoying. Scrolling up takes like half a second...
- soapdog 12y ago
  This really depends on the device. iOS devices with their fancy inertial stuff scrolling is very pleasant but if you're using entry level cheap devices, scrolling is not as easy or pleasant. Specially with the new trend of infinite scrolling sites where your scroll down for days...
  - nknighthb 12y ago
    Is there a device where tapping the top of the screen doesn't immediately scroll to the top? If anything, these bars are worse on devices that have poor scrolling behavior, as I've found they tend to interfere with scrolling.
    - gbl08ma 12y ago
      Yes, most Android devices don't have that feature as far as I know. And it is possibly a bad time to introduce it, because by now users may have already learned that tapping the status bar (on recent Android versions at least) shows the time and date in bigger fonts, as if starting to open the notifications screen.
    - jagger27 12y ago
      Chrome on Android doesn't.
  - frik 12y ago
    Infinte scroll works fine on deskop, but is not very useful on mobile devices with a spotty connection. Though, personally I would like pagination (like Google) back for Facebook, Flickr and also Google Images - scrolling down a few "pages" is just buggy on those sites, and click on the wrong link and you have to go back and scroll all the way down!
- 12y ago
sp332 12y ago
Vimeo has an odd top-bar that hardly shows up at all when you first load the page, but if you scroll up (when you're already at the top of the page) it unfolds and shows you more videos. e.g. http://vimeo.com/28408829 http://vimeo.com/28408829
lukasm 12y ago
FYI one plugin that does that is http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/ http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/
- grsmto 12y ago
  Great! Mailchimp had it on their website but they removed it (dunno why). I like the way the menu doesn't show if you scroll up slowly(!)
- WickyNilliams 12y ago
  Thanks for the shout out :) I built this after enjoying the pattern in the Android browser on honeycomb (3.0). They eventually added it to chrome after I suggested it to Paul Irish!
RobotCaleb 12y ago
They're a problem on non-mobile, as well. If the bar is over content, but the scrollbar isn't adjusted for it, pressing space or pagedown doesn't move down one page worth of visible content. I don't get why breaking pagedown is acceptable. It's my preferred way to read long text.
- paol 12y ago
  Yes, this is quite a pet peeve of mine. Every other site nowadays seems to do this, even ones that I thought should know better (arstechnica is one that comes to mind)
- rbonvall 12y ago
  It is also my pet peeve. It is a big disadvantage, and I haven't ever needed the top bar (or wished it was there when there isn't one) so for me top bars are a feature with negative score. I guess we spacebarers are a minority and most people use the mouse wheel or the down arrow.
  - pimlottc 12y ago
    > I guess we spacebarers are a minority and most people use the mouse wheel or the down arrow. I wondered recently if this doesn't bother other people; but all three of the other developers I sit with said they scroll via mouse/touchpad. One of them said he wasn't even aware of doing it consciously.
- pimlottc 12y ago
  Thank you! It is a huge peeve of mine as well. There needs to be a good post somewhere to publicize this issue. Something you can point to when you find a broken site that lays out the solution so it can be fixed. But I'm not sure exactly what the mechanism is that causes this; I thought it was simple a case of forgetting to add top padding to the page body, but that doesn't always seem to be the case. Last time I saw a site that did this, it already had the padding but still misbehaved in Chrome. Yet the paging worked correctly in Firefox! Further testing showed Safari worked, so (in this case, at least) it seemed to be webkit-related. But that's just one scenario. I suspect there's a number of ways people get this wrong, and it's unfortunately not just a single simple fix for all cases.
SoftwareMaven 12y ago
What's worse is some sites that do this can't seem to differentiate between iPads and iPhones and seem to use percentages everywhere in their CSS. As a result, you get a huge header (which feels larger in landscape orientation).
- mercer 12y ago
  I've had helpful 'popups' on mobile sites that I couldn't close because the close button was perpetually out of screen, as they were not designed for the small screen. To my surprise, I've seen this on a number of big sites. It baffles me that nobody ever noticed this bug, but on the other hand I can see how this would happen. The developers probably never noticed because they already had the cookie that prevents the popup from showing. Still...
- tambourmajor 12y ago
  Another big annoyance is when the mobile mode is solely based on the user agent string and there is no way to deactivate it other than changing the user agent (for example Google Search). It’s almost as if no Google employee has a tablet device. I would be genuinely interested in seeing behind the curtains of decisions like this one.
  - judk 12y ago
    Google believes tablets are mobile. Heck, with the new maps, Google thinks desktops are mobile!
Aardwolf 12y ago
Am I the only one who prefers to read websites in "desktop" mode? I always feel totally alienated by the mobile page, there is information left out, annoying badly-implemented JS scrollers, etc... The "desktop" site looks always more nice and familiar, and you can zoom and scroll around as you wish to read everything.
- EC1 12y ago
  Mobile sites should ONLY serve you text for an article. I don't understand how people don't understand this when created UI/UX for products.
  - leorocky 12y ago
    Well I want to see the image for the article too. We're still figuring all this out anyway. I doubt that as long as people want to show ads on tiny space challenged screens (a very long time), reading news on a phone will suck. I will also mention that I think having switched to an Android phone with a large screen (the Galaxy S5) has improved this problem for me. The iPhone screen is just too small and Apple really needs to make a larger screen phone because that tiny thing isn't competitive, but I'm a very big person with big hands and big pockets. The S5 is also a very good phone, the plastic casing is weird, but I just put it in a really nice case and I never even notice the cheap materials the thing is made with.
    - EC1 12y ago
      It's real easy. [text] [image on new line, click to open in new window] [text continuation] I don't think the iPhone is too small at all. In comparison to others, yes, but standalone, I don't think so. I use pocket for reading anyways since all my articles are centralized.
- barrkel 12y ago
  No, you're not alone. I almost always choose desktop mode where available, primarily because mobile sites disable zoom and choose settings for margins and font sizes that make their text almost unreadably large - frequently only two or three words per line, with masses of whitespace all around. Reading such articles feels claustrophobic, because you're stuck in this long tunnel of text, with little visual indicator of how long it lasts, inducing anxiety about wasted time. If you're somewhere in the middle, it's a long trip back up to the top. The close to optimal mobile browser for me was the original (AOSP) Android browser around 2.3. It rewrapped text on double-tap to fit in the visible page area, meaning you could choose what effective font size worked well for you. And zoom still worked, so you had a good handle on where you were on the page, and an easy way out of it. Neither Firefox nor Chrome on Android are as good a browser for me. Unfortunately, getting the AOSP browser back is awkward, unless you want to use Dolphin or similar, and besides, it no longer has the rewrap functionality. PS: Google are the evil people here. They deliberately removed this feature from Chrome and AOSP browser, and are punishing sites that don't serve mobile-specific content - i.e. content that is less usable for people who prefer zoom-based navigation.
julenx 12y ago
Am I the only one hating Twitter's Android app behavior in terms of fixed bars? I tend to read tweets from oldest to newest, and the "Home/Discover/Activity" bar always gets on my way. Moreover, I don't even need the top blue bar. Just gimme the content!
mmphosis 12y ago
I used to call these type of things, short-lived fads really: User Interface (UI) element of the week. Fortunately, UI isn't changing that often anymore. However, Javascript and the "mobile" platform are bringing "User Interface element of the week" back. I am seeing lots of weird scrolly things these days. And, pages that blink out and then reappear, as they get rendered and rerendered and rerendered again by Javascript. Lots of other annoying Web 2.0 thingies that do little more than annoy. If I was a better writer, I could probably write a weekly WTF about "User Interface element of the week." Yes, "fixed bars" are annoying. We've had "fixed bars" on non-mobile for as long as I remember: Main Menu Bar, Title Bar, ooh and now a "Tab Bar" which is just the modern version of Windows MDI, maybe Windows MDI, Navigation bar(s) which sometimes takes up a quarter of the screen height I kid you not, the Bookmarks Bar which gets hidden the first time I open the browser and all corporate links get deleted what a pain. Including your "bar" in the contents and letting it scroll away might be easiest, and the author noted medium's clever idea.
jasontsui 12y ago
Fun pattern, but is it more useful? I think its hyperbolic to call losing 160px of reading space on top of a desktop browser a "nightmare". Something a user can see all the time has greater affordances than something that is hidden. Especially if that something is as essential as navigation. Honestly, I think this is more style than usability.
- SilasX 12y ago
  Yes, losing 25% of the already-scarce vertical space is a nightmare, to the extent that UX can be a nightmare. Plus, I've seen sites where the nav bar locks the URL bar in position and keeps me unable to scroll away from it, making it more like 50%. It's like I'm looking at the site through blinds! And it's all for functionality I'm not even going to use!
masterleep 12y ago
Fixed bars are annoying and should rarely be used. But what's even worse is when the mobile version helpfully removes the content or feature that you'd like to see. Please just have one site, make it efficient, and be done with it.
- mercer 12y ago
  I'm so happy that google is not officially recommending this. More than once that's been the one argument that worked with clients.
  - hiphopyo 12y ago
    I really hope they'll bring up this issue at this year's IO.
- nostromo 12y ago
  It's so much easier to fuck up mobile than it is to do it right. And if you're not doing it exactly right, don't do it at all. Here's what the EC2 console looks like on mobile: http://i.imgur.com/MfbCdhU.png http://i.imgur.com/MfbCdhU.png It appears that Amazon is doing this on purpose... <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=no"> Yes... user-scalable=no
  - MattHeard 12y ago
    > Disabling user-scalable (namely, the ability to double tap to zoom) allows the browser to reduce the click delay. In touch-enable browsers, when the user expects the double tap to zoom, the browser generally waits 300ms before firing the click event, waiting to see if the user will double tap. Disabling user-scalable allows for the Chrome browser to fire the click event immediately, allowing for a better user experience. > From Google IO 2013 session https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DujfpXOKUp8#t=1435s https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Dujf... Source: http://stackoverflow.com/a/16910559 http://stackoverflow.com/a/16910559
jessaustin 12y ago
Is it weird that the title of TFA is "The Scroll Up Bar" and the title of this post is "Fixed bars are becoming a new nightmare on mobile"?
dang 12y ago
We reverted the title. The submitted title was "Fixed bars are becoming a new nightmare on mobile". The HN guidelines ask you not to rewrite titles. Especially please do not rewrite them to make them more controversial.
vxNsr 12y ago
FIxed bars and JS pop-ups are the window pop-ups of the 90's and really I'm just waiting for someone to make a chrome extension that takes care of 'em in the same way. The only real issue is that mobile browsers don't allow extensions of any kind (at least the ones I've used don't). So there is no real way to add such customizations to mobile browsers, and we're left hoping they go mainstream enough that someone either creates a browser around that feature (ie useragent switch, which is kind of annoying to use because it means copying the url and switching apps), or a dev in a mainstream browser makes it their weekend project. Neither one of these options is ideal, in the first you're left with a bunch of browsers that do one thing, in the latter you're going to end up with a feature that will slowly stop working as the dev's main work builds and his manager tells him to drop it.
baby 12y ago
I see no problems at all with fixed top bars. They take what? 20pixels? 50 pixels at most. It's really not a huge loss. I'm more annoyed by lateral bars since I already use the horizontal space with tree style tab.
- nevir 12y ago
  40-50 pixels is generally what you want (for decently sized touch targets)
erso 12y ago
An interesting way to solve the issue is to hide the bar when scrolling down, and show it when scrolling up. This pattern is one of the many irritating things about the mobile Chrome and iOS 7 browsers that prevents me from using devices implementing either. I typically stick to reading around the top of my device, and occasionally I want to re-read something I just read. Instead of just getting to re-read the hidden lines, I have to continue scrolling while stupid chrome or a fixed bar appears, and then finally lets me scroll the content. It's probably the case that a lot of people love this, but I hate it. If I want to see the browser chrome or navigational elements, I'm happy to tap the top of the window to scroll me there. I don't want the browser trying to figure out what I want to do based purely on scrolling.
currysausage 12y ago
> An interesting way to solve the issue is to hide the bar when scrolling down, and show it when scrolling up. No. When I scroll up, that's what I usually want to do: scroll up, see some content that is currently out of view. If that bar appears first, I have to swipe an inch more, which doesn't sound that horrible, but it results in an inconsistency between mental model (swipe down 1 inch, see what is 1 inch above) and technological reality (sorry, you need to scroll 2 inches!). In the eBay Android app, where I want to quickly compare search results, this annoys the hell out of me. One of the best things about touch interfaces is the natural mapping between mental model and technology. Let's not break this.
pimlottc 12y ago
I suspect this was influenced by the browser behavior in iOS 7. Almost all the browser chrome (full address bar and status bar) disappears when you start scrolling but reappears if you scroll back up quickly. In fact, the iOS behavior is rather more nuanced: * Scrolling down hides chrome * Swiping up quickly reveals chrome * Scrolling up slowly does not reveal chrome * Scrolling to the top of the page reveals chrome * Over-scrolling past the bottom reveals chrome It's often interesting to see how much consideration Apple puts into small details like this.
- rrrx3 12y ago
  This is also the best implementation. I think there's some stuff lost in translation when done on the web. Dollars to doughnuts these UI patterns don't have a speed function in them to adjust for intent.
- ajanuary 12y ago
  Also tapping the bottom of the screen reveals the chrome, which is really useful for not losing your place.
nilved 12y ago
I'm quite surprised to see anybody suggesting this pattern be used, because it's exactly why I had to stop using Firefox for Android. It makes no sense to need to scroll up and lose your place in a page to access the menu. Whichever designer suggested those two actions be bound together doesn't have any business designing.
- rrrx3 12y ago
  Scrolling has long been established as a transient action. It makes total sense to submerge the menu until such time as it's needed. This pattern is prevalent in plenty of mobile apps. Google Chrome on iOS is a shining example. Safari, as well. You can make a reasonable assumption that users scrolling down are reading content, and thusly have no need for the menu bar. What I'm seeing from your perspective is that you're failing to recognize that "losing your place" in order to reveal the menu is a complete change of task. By bringing back the menu, or even using it if it were in place statically, your task and intent has shifted. If you've decided to abort your menu task and revert to reading content, it provides less cognitive friction to let the user scroll themselves back to their original place. My question to you is - what logical sense does it make to stop reading an article midway through and begin interacting with the menu, unless your intent is to navigate away from the content itself? And if it makes sense to you to do this, why do you find yourself changing and aborting tasks so swiftly? Are there other interactions that you've failed to discover that might be beneficial (tap and hold to get a menu, for example)? TL;DR - you're bitching about an edge case.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - rrrx3 12y ago
      Again, I'll reiterate - scrolling is frictionless. > Secondly, even if I am changing tasks, that doesn't mean ruining the state I leave in it is an acceptable side effect. Your browser history isn't corrupted when you leave Firefox. That's a stretch. Ruining? You can still scroll down. The affordances of these actions means, at most, you're going to have to touch the screen once more to "get back to where you were." If you're using an application that doesn't provide the menu after a short swipe, that's a fair enough issue to raise with the implementation of the pattern, not with the pattern itself. It doesn't surprise me that you encountered it on FF Mobile, because FF has a longstanding tradition of ripping things off from successful UIs and getting them wholly wrong in their implementations. > I can hardly believe the question needs to be asked, but it would be more appropriate to say "what logical sense does it make to bind scrolling to menu actions?" (The answer is none, which is why we didn't have this feature until now, and won't have it for long.) That's your opinion. Unfortunately for you in this case, it's wrong. Try it on iOS Chrome / Android Chrome or Safari and see how it's done properly before making a sweeping judgment on the interaction pattern itself.
Pxtl 12y ago
I honestly loathe the "scroll up bar" feature in Chrome browser because it throws off my instincts about how to interact with the UI. If something auto-hides into the top of the screen, my instinct is to pull it down from the top if I want to see it again. That just brings up the Android notification system.
emsy 12y ago
The worst implementation I've seen was for a desktop only web application. The navigation bar was only expanded when the scrollbar was at the very top. For very long pages they implemented a button that scrolls the user back to the top of the page so the navigation bar expands and the user can navigate. In the meantime, the horizontal space went mainly unused. The boss saw the IBM page and wanted the menus like this.
WickyNilliams 12y ago
Someone has already mentioned my JS lib to handle this below, but as the author I feel compelled to mention it myself with some additional explanation. I built headroom.js [0] to handle exactly this. It simply adds classes at scroll up or down so you can be as fancy as you want (or not!) with the show hide effect. You can set a custom offset (eg. Don't invoke the hide/show mechanism until 100px down the page), you can set a tolerance (eg. Must have scrolled more than 10px before hide/show) and a few other features for more advanced usage. And for fun I built a little playground so you can explore the various features and find a configuration you like [1] [0] http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/ http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/ [1] http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/playroom/ http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/playroom/ (meta: I submitted it here, but it never gained traction, someone else submitted it to designer news and it absolutely blew up, can't believe it almost has 4000 stars!)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- hiphopyo 12y ago
  Keep it up!! Honestly you deserve more stars..
dkrich 12y ago
The problem is that he's assuming the primary goal of the site's UI is to make reading the content as enjoyable and efficient an experience as possible. Sadly, that's rarely the case. A site like Forbes gets paid every time you click through to another article. Once you've landed on an article and you're reading it, your value to them has been expended. Thus they have almost a diametrically-opposed interest to yours- you want to read the content uninterrupted, and they want you to click another link.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  One of the many insidious ways in which advertising (and the business practices resulting from it) is overtly harmful.
rl3 12y ago
Firefox Browser for Android's default settings requires you to scroll up somewhat rapidly on the page you're currently reading to reveal the browser's auto-hidden URL bar and menu. I tend to loathe this functionality because it means slightly losing my place every time I want to multitask when reading something. I suppose it wouldn't be so bad as part of a website when viewed from a desktop environment, because you can easily highlight where you left off on the page much easier than you can on a tablet, for example.
- 0h139 12y ago
  You can disable this behavior by unchecking the checkbox in Settings -> Display -> Scroll title bar.
  - rl3 12y ago
    Good point, thanks!
wurzelgogerer 12y ago
i agree with the post. but i just noticed on my desktop chrome browser that medium also applies the same behavior on here. i believe this is not necessary, as on a desktop i have plenty of reading space and this way im actually experiencing a less usable version of a website....
fdsary 12y ago
After being into this field for quite a while now, I feel like there are no better web design than no web design. Plain html works great on any device, is very readable, accessible and lightweight. There's nothing to lose in having 0 loc css.
- err4nt 12y ago
  I wouldn't say 0 loc CSS is nothing to lose, I've been using Markdown to format some really basic notes, and here's my stylesheet for styling markdown documents: http://staticresource.com/styledown.css http://staticresource.com/styledown.css It's still a work-in-progress, but it's great for documenting my code as I work on websites. Here's a demo page with some tests of the markdown output I generated on the command-line using pandoc: http://staticresource.com/misc/demo.html http://staticresource.com/misc/demo.html I'm grabbing web fonts from Google. It's responsive and reads well on desktop, tablet, and phone. The styles still work offline (with no web fonts) There isn't a whole ton of CSS there (I work with files 500 loc CSS up to 5k or 7k a a time. I whipped this up in one morning because I was tired of my IDE's markdown live preview, so now I have folders on my server that are watched, and any time I save a markdown file it automatically regenerates the HTML in the same folder. Anyway, you can't say there's NOTHING to lose having 0 loc CSS. Here's what that same markdown demo that looks like with no CSS: http://staticresource.com/misc/demohtml.html http://staticresource.com/misc/demohtml.html Think they are equivalent?
beloch 12y ago
Dear website developers, I'm sorry your feelings were hurt when I declined to install your wonderful app that offers access to your website. Perhaps I just wasn't open to the awesome possibilities your app was offering me, but I already have a web browser that works just fine and couldn't be arsed to install more stuff. It's not you, it's me. I'm a bad, bad person. I get it. Now, about your "Scroll Up Bar"... It is indeed a very fine looking user interface, but my web browser already has one. I just can't seem to stop doing things that hurt your feelings, but could you please give me the option to turn that thing off? If you're really having trouble justifying your job, perhaps I can help you out with a small suggestion. You may have noticed a trend towards wider aspect ratio screens over the last few years. Screens have gotten so bloody wide that practically nobody wants to read a column of text that is fully as wide as their screen! People were designing websites with UI elements on the sides even back when screens were slender 1.33:1 twigs instead of the McDonald's super-sized behemoths we have on our desks today. Perhaps you should take your bar, rotate it 90 degrees, and stick it on the side where there's space for it! Sincerely, An ungrateful, lazy, bad person who just can't be pleased.
bobbles 12y ago
I loathe what The Verge has done when browsing the site on an iPad. That awful little black box stays stuck in the middle of my screen, and even selecting close just makes it a smaller black box in the middle of my screen.
coldnebo 12y ago
Dear website users, We feel your pain. It may not seem like it since we develop ever more complicated UI schemes to overcome the W3C's frankenstandards (seriously, who comes up with a coordinate system based on a 'nominal arms length away' from the screen and then creates another set of units for mobile. I know there's a lot of smart people who contribute great data standards from the W3C, but when it came to presentation standards they either 1) completely forgot their linear algebra or 2) didn't bother to look at Postcript's coordinate system or both). Some of us are reinventing the browser as it should have been written (with polyfills and shims), but this will take a while to get right. (For those that remember, Alan Kay originally said there should be no browser, just a code container, we are once again getting close to something he said decades before). We understand that the W3C has set the expectation that everything bad on the web happens because of us devs not following their "standards" (even when alt changes to title changes to picture caption in as many years), but at some point it might be worth asking them "why are your presentation standards so inconsistent and hard to follow?" Sincerely, A webdev who is tired of cajoling CSS and JS to reinvent the same god-damned three column layout that should have worked in the 90's (oh wait, you didn't realize that Postscript predates the web? Yes, yes it did. So the W3C could have sought presentation layer experts of its time in drafting presentation standards, but didn't).
_cipher_ 12y ago
Simpler solution: every keyboard has a 'Home' button -> MAGIC. ;)

192 points by muloka 12y ago

Worse than taking up screen space, these bars often exhibit laggy scrolling behavior and cause other UI bugs. There are very few well working implementations of such fixed bars, partly due to difficulties like the position:fixed implementation in Mobile Safari[0] - unless that has been changed in iOS7. I highly recommend to refrain from using position:fixed on mobile devices. [0] http://remysharp.com/2012/05/24/issues-with-position-fixed-scrolling-on-ios/ http://remysharp.com/2012/05/24/issues-with-position-fixed-s...

badman_ting 12y ago
Mobile web moves too quickly to care about what was true 2 entire years ago :) iOS got position: fixed a couple versions back, and iOS users upgrade rapidly. So, the advice not to use position: fixed on mobile may still be good, but iOS isn't the reason why.

lnanek2 12y ago

I was all ready to complain that I want some sort of nav/menu thing always stuck at the top, but I'm actually OK with the solution presented where it just shows as soon as you scroll up without having to scroll all the way.

jrajav 12y ago
This is exactly how Chrome for Android works with its toolbar and I think it works very nicely.

jasonkostempski 12y ago

I don't know if Android has the feature where you just tap the status bar to scroll to top but iOS does. With that feature I'd rather nav bars just stay at the top of the page, I'll just tap the status bar if I need to get back up there, which is almost never anyway.

jrajav 12y ago
Android doesn't have that by default, you need an app for it, and I'm pretty sure you also need to be rooted. Definitely not something you can depend on users having.

dmalik 12y ago

I was hoping to read about a usability study done when I clicked the link. I do agree for blogs and articles but for web apps I'm not sold.

dj-wonk 12y ago
Right. Breadcrumbs and/or nav bars on apps are nice.
- hiphopyo 12y ago
  Indeed: http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/33071/are-breadcrumbs-still-in http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/33071/are-breadcrumbs-...
hiphopyo 12y ago
There's one in the works over here: http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/57990/how-usable-are-scroll-up-bars http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/57990/how-usable-are-s...

JamisonM 12y ago

The thing about this is that there is, as far as I can tell, no good solution for the fact that it can take a long, long time to return to the top of a page with a lot of text on a mobile device. If I read 3/4 of a lengthy story on my phone and I want to navigate somewhere else on the same website my only practical option is to revisit the main page of the site and start navigating from there. Do any mobile browsers have a "return to top of page" function? My keyboard has a "Home" key, my phone does not.

micampe 12y ago
I don't know what mobile phone you use, but on iOS tapping the status bar scrolls back to the top of the page (or anything else that scrolls in the system).
- farmdawgnation 12y ago
  Aside: Is there a way to detect that happening in JavaScript? Just thinking that detecting the user doing that and then showing the site's nav bar again would be groovy...
  - micampe 12y ago
    I don't know, but I don't think it's wise to override a system behavior in ways the user doesn't expect. Better just put a button on the page.
  - nilved 12y ago
    Yes, onscroll
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
hrvbr 12y ago
In Safari Mobile, tapping the top of the screen brings you back to the top of the page.
12y ago

lobo_tuerto 12y ago

The solution presented there is the same used by Google Chrome on Android, it might surprise a totally new user, but one gets used to it pretty fast. Seems like it's the best solution all around.

dj-wonk 12y ago

"Creeper" nav bars (an appropriate term, I think) are partly a consequence of mobile devices not letting you instantly jump to the top of a page. Mobile devices should offer a snappy, intuitive way to jump to the top or bottom of a page.

avel 12y ago
Opera on mobile had an awesome implementation of "jump to top": You scroll upwards twice or just quickly enough, and if you still have a long way to go, a button pops up for scrolling automatically to the top. I wish this was implemented universally in Android. http://lifehacker.com/5784500/opera-mobile-11-is-a-zippy-browser-for-android-and-symbian-phones http://lifehacker.com/5784500/opera-mobile-11-is-a-zippy-bro...
ajanuary 12y ago
You can jump to the top of most native iOS scrollable content, including web content in Mobile Safari, by tapping the system bar at the top of the screen

xux 12y ago

For me, the ideal solution is just get rid of the fixed bar, and have a clickable menu drop down. I don't want a page to analyze every of my behaviors and try to predict what I want to do. Sometimes I just like to scroll up and down to look for stuff, and I don't want some bar flashing in and out.

derwildemomo 12y ago
Well, you must have missed the discussion a few days ago about the evilness of the hamburger button. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7794505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7794505 The main argument against using a menu-button is that it hides the contents behind it, which makes them hard to discover and interact with.
JetSpiegel 12y ago
http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

pera 12y ago

I don't get why these bars are being used everywhere, personally I find them annoying. Scrolling up takes like half a second...

soapdog 12y ago
This really depends on the device. iOS devices with their fancy inertial stuff scrolling is very pleasant but if you're using entry level cheap devices, scrolling is not as easy or pleasant. Specially with the new trend of infinite scrolling sites where your scroll down for days...
- nknighthb 12y ago
  Is there a device where tapping the top of the screen doesn't immediately scroll to the top? If anything, these bars are worse on devices that have poor scrolling behavior, as I've found they tend to interfere with scrolling.
  - gbl08ma 12y ago
    Yes, most Android devices don't have that feature as far as I know. And it is possibly a bad time to introduce it, because by now users may have already learned that tapping the status bar (on recent Android versions at least) shows the time and date in bigger fonts, as if starting to open the notifications screen.
  - jagger27 12y ago
    Chrome on Android doesn't.
- frik 12y ago
  Infinte scroll works fine on deskop, but is not very useful on mobile devices with a spotty connection. Though, personally I would like pagination (like Google) back for Facebook, Flickr and also Google Images - scrolling down a few "pages" is just buggy on those sites, and click on the wrong link and you have to go back and scroll all the way down!
12y ago

sp332 12y ago

Vimeo has an odd top-bar that hardly shows up at all when you first load the page, but if you scroll up (when you're already at the top of the page) it unfolds and shows you more videos. e.g. http://vimeo.com/28408829 http://vimeo.com/28408829

lukasm 12y ago

FYI one plugin that does that is http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/ http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/

grsmto 12y ago
Great! Mailchimp had it on their website but they removed it (dunno why). I like the way the menu doesn't show if you scroll up slowly(!)
WickyNilliams 12y ago
Thanks for the shout out :) I built this after enjoying the pattern in the Android browser on honeycomb (3.0). They eventually added it to chrome after I suggested it to Paul Irish!

RobotCaleb 12y ago

They're a problem on non-mobile, as well. If the bar is over content, but the scrollbar isn't adjusted for it, pressing space or pagedown doesn't move down one page worth of visible content. I don't get why breaking pagedown is acceptable. It's my preferred way to read long text.

paol 12y ago
Yes, this is quite a pet peeve of mine. Every other site nowadays seems to do this, even ones that I thought should know better (arstechnica is one that comes to mind)
rbonvall 12y ago
It is also my pet peeve. It is a big disadvantage, and I haven't ever needed the top bar (or wished it was there when there isn't one) so for me top bars are a feature with negative score. I guess we spacebarers are a minority and most people use the mouse wheel or the down arrow.
- pimlottc 12y ago
  > I guess we spacebarers are a minority and most people use the mouse wheel or the down arrow. I wondered recently if this doesn't bother other people; but all three of the other developers I sit with said they scroll via mouse/touchpad. One of them said he wasn't even aware of doing it consciously.
pimlottc 12y ago
Thank you! It is a huge peeve of mine as well. There needs to be a good post somewhere to publicize this issue. Something you can point to when you find a broken site that lays out the solution so it can be fixed. But I'm not sure exactly what the mechanism is that causes this; I thought it was simple a case of forgetting to add top padding to the page body, but that doesn't always seem to be the case. Last time I saw a site that did this, it already had the padding but still misbehaved in Chrome. Yet the paging worked correctly in Firefox! Further testing showed Safari worked, so (in this case, at least) it seemed to be webkit-related. But that's just one scenario. I suspect there's a number of ways people get this wrong, and it's unfortunately not just a single simple fix for all cases.

SoftwareMaven 12y ago

What's worse is some sites that do this can't seem to differentiate between iPads and iPhones and seem to use percentages everywhere in their CSS. As a result, you get a huge header (which feels larger in landscape orientation).

mercer 12y ago
I've had helpful 'popups' on mobile sites that I couldn't close because the close button was perpetually out of screen, as they were not designed for the small screen. To my surprise, I've seen this on a number of big sites. It baffles me that nobody ever noticed this bug, but on the other hand I can see how this would happen. The developers probably never noticed because they already had the cookie that prevents the popup from showing. Still...
tambourmajor 12y ago
Another big annoyance is when the mobile mode is solely based on the user agent string and there is no way to deactivate it other than changing the user agent (for example Google Search). It’s almost as if no Google employee has a tablet device. I would be genuinely interested in seeing behind the curtains of decisions like this one.
- judk 12y ago
  Google believes tablets are mobile. Heck, with the new maps, Google thinks desktops are mobile!

Aardwolf 12y ago

Am I the only one who prefers to read websites in "desktop" mode? I always feel totally alienated by the mobile page, there is information left out, annoying badly-implemented JS scrollers, etc... The "desktop" site looks always more nice and familiar, and you can zoom and scroll around as you wish to read everything.

EC1 12y ago
Mobile sites should ONLY serve you text for an article. I don't understand how people don't understand this when created UI/UX for products.
- leorocky 12y ago
  Well I want to see the image for the article too. We're still figuring all this out anyway. I doubt that as long as people want to show ads on tiny space challenged screens (a very long time), reading news on a phone will suck. I will also mention that I think having switched to an Android phone with a large screen (the Galaxy S5) has improved this problem for me. The iPhone screen is just too small and Apple really needs to make a larger screen phone because that tiny thing isn't competitive, but I'm a very big person with big hands and big pockets. The S5 is also a very good phone, the plastic casing is weird, but I just put it in a really nice case and I never even notice the cheap materials the thing is made with.
  - EC1 12y ago
    It's real easy. [text] [image on new line, click to open in new window] [text continuation] I don't think the iPhone is too small at all. In comparison to others, yes, but standalone, I don't think so. I use pocket for reading anyways since all my articles are centralized.
barrkel 12y ago
No, you're not alone. I almost always choose desktop mode where available, primarily because mobile sites disable zoom and choose settings for margins and font sizes that make their text almost unreadably large - frequently only two or three words per line, with masses of whitespace all around. Reading such articles feels claustrophobic, because you're stuck in this long tunnel of text, with little visual indicator of how long it lasts, inducing anxiety about wasted time. If you're somewhere in the middle, it's a long trip back up to the top. The close to optimal mobile browser for me was the original (AOSP) Android browser around 2.3. It rewrapped text on double-tap to fit in the visible page area, meaning you could choose what effective font size worked well for you. And zoom still worked, so you had a good handle on where you were on the page, and an easy way out of it. Neither Firefox nor Chrome on Android are as good a browser for me. Unfortunately, getting the AOSP browser back is awkward, unless you want to use Dolphin or similar, and besides, it no longer has the rewrap functionality. PS: Google are the evil people here. They deliberately removed this feature from Chrome and AOSP browser, and are punishing sites that don't serve mobile-specific content - i.e. content that is less usable for people who prefer zoom-based navigation.

julenx 12y ago

Am I the only one hating Twitter's Android app behavior in terms of fixed bars? I tend to read tweets from oldest to newest, and the "Home/Discover/Activity" bar always gets on my way. Moreover, I don't even need the top blue bar. Just gimme the content!

mmphosis 12y ago

I used to call these type of things, short-lived fads really: User Interface (UI) element of the week. Fortunately, UI isn't changing that often anymore. However, Javascript and the "mobile" platform are bringing "User Interface element of the week" back. I am seeing lots of weird scrolly things these days. And, pages that blink out and then reappear, as they get rendered and rerendered and rerendered again by Javascript. Lots of other annoying Web 2.0 thingies that do little more than annoy. If I was a better writer, I could probably write a weekly WTF about "User Interface element of the week." Yes, "fixed bars" are annoying. We've had "fixed bars" on non-mobile for as long as I remember: Main Menu Bar, Title Bar, ooh and now a "Tab Bar" which is just the modern version of Windows MDI, maybe Windows MDI, Navigation bar(s) which sometimes takes up a quarter of the screen height I kid you not, the Bookmarks Bar which gets hidden the first time I open the browser and all corporate links get deleted what a pain. Including your "bar" in the contents and letting it scroll away might be easiest, and the author noted medium's clever idea.

jasontsui 12y ago

Fun pattern, but is it more useful? I think its hyperbolic to call losing 160px of reading space on top of a desktop browser a "nightmare". Something a user can see all the time has greater affordances than something that is hidden. Especially if that something is as essential as navigation. Honestly, I think this is more style than usability.

SilasX 12y ago
Yes, losing 25% of the already-scarce vertical space is a nightmare, to the extent that UX can be a nightmare. Plus, I've seen sites where the nav bar locks the URL bar in position and keeps me unable to scroll away from it, making it more like 50%. It's like I'm looking at the site through blinds! And it's all for functionality I'm not even going to use!

masterleep 12y ago

Fixed bars are annoying and should rarely be used. But what's even worse is when the mobile version helpfully removes the content or feature that you'd like to see. Please just have one site, make it efficient, and be done with it.

mercer 12y ago
I'm so happy that google is not officially recommending this. More than once that's been the one argument that worked with clients.
- hiphopyo 12y ago
  I really hope they'll bring up this issue at this year's IO.
nostromo 12y ago
It's so much easier to fuck up mobile than it is to do it right. And if you're not doing it exactly right, don't do it at all. Here's what the EC2 console looks like on mobile: http://i.imgur.com/MfbCdhU.png http://i.imgur.com/MfbCdhU.png It appears that Amazon is doing this on purpose... <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=no"> Yes... user-scalable=no
- MattHeard 12y ago
  > Disabling user-scalable (namely, the ability to double tap to zoom) allows the browser to reduce the click delay. In touch-enable browsers, when the user expects the double tap to zoom, the browser generally waits 300ms before firing the click event, waiting to see if the user will double tap. Disabling user-scalable allows for the Chrome browser to fire the click event immediately, allowing for a better user experience. > From Google IO 2013 session https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DujfpXOKUp8#t=1435s https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Dujf... Source: http://stackoverflow.com/a/16910559 http://stackoverflow.com/a/16910559

jessaustin 12y ago

Is it weird that the title of TFA is "The Scroll Up Bar" and the title of this post is "Fixed bars are becoming a new nightmare on mobile"?

dang 12y ago

We reverted the title. The submitted title was "Fixed bars are becoming a new nightmare on mobile". The HN guidelines ask you not to rewrite titles. Especially please do not rewrite them to make them more controversial.

vxNsr 12y ago

FIxed bars and JS pop-ups are the window pop-ups of the 90's and really I'm just waiting for someone to make a chrome extension that takes care of 'em in the same way. The only real issue is that mobile browsers don't allow extensions of any kind (at least the ones I've used don't). So there is no real way to add such customizations to mobile browsers, and we're left hoping they go mainstream enough that someone either creates a browser around that feature (ie useragent switch, which is kind of annoying to use because it means copying the url and switching apps), or a dev in a mainstream browser makes it their weekend project. Neither one of these options is ideal, in the first you're left with a bunch of browsers that do one thing, in the latter you're going to end up with a feature that will slowly stop working as the dev's main work builds and his manager tells him to drop it.

baby 12y ago

I see no problems at all with fixed top bars. They take what? 20pixels? 50 pixels at most. It's really not a huge loss. I'm more annoyed by lateral bars since I already use the horizontal space with tree style tab.

nevir 12y ago
40-50 pixels is generally what you want (for decently sized touch targets)

erso 12y ago

An interesting way to solve the issue is to hide the bar when scrolling down, and show it when scrolling up. This pattern is one of the many irritating things about the mobile Chrome and iOS 7 browsers that prevents me from using devices implementing either. I typically stick to reading around the top of my device, and occasionally I want to re-read something I just read. Instead of just getting to re-read the hidden lines, I have to continue scrolling while stupid chrome or a fixed bar appears, and then finally lets me scroll the content. It's probably the case that a lot of people love this, but I hate it. If I want to see the browser chrome or navigational elements, I'm happy to tap the top of the window to scroll me there. I don't want the browser trying to figure out what I want to do based purely on scrolling.

currysausage 12y ago

> An interesting way to solve the issue is to hide the bar when scrolling down, and show it when scrolling up. No. When I scroll up, that's what I usually want to do: scroll up, see some content that is currently out of view. If that bar appears first, I have to swipe an inch more, which doesn't sound that horrible, but it results in an inconsistency between mental model (swipe down 1 inch, see what is 1 inch above) and technological reality (sorry, you need to scroll 2 inches!). In the eBay Android app, where I want to quickly compare search results, this annoys the hell out of me. One of the best things about touch interfaces is the natural mapping between mental model and technology. Let's not break this.

pimlottc 12y ago

I suspect this was influenced by the browser behavior in iOS 7. Almost all the browser chrome (full address bar and status bar) disappears when you start scrolling but reappears if you scroll back up quickly. In fact, the iOS behavior is rather more nuanced: * Scrolling down hides chrome * Swiping up quickly reveals chrome * Scrolling up slowly does not reveal chrome * Scrolling to the top of the page reveals chrome * Over-scrolling past the bottom reveals chrome It's often interesting to see how much consideration Apple puts into small details like this.

rrrx3 12y ago
This is also the best implementation. I think there's some stuff lost in translation when done on the web. Dollars to doughnuts these UI patterns don't have a speed function in them to adjust for intent.
ajanuary 12y ago
Also tapping the bottom of the screen reveals the chrome, which is really useful for not losing your place.

nilved 12y ago

I'm quite surprised to see anybody suggesting this pattern be used, because it's exactly why I had to stop using Firefox for Android. It makes no sense to need to scroll up and lose your place in a page to access the menu. Whichever designer suggested those two actions be bound together doesn't have any business designing.

rrrx3 12y ago
Scrolling has long been established as a transient action. It makes total sense to submerge the menu until such time as it's needed. This pattern is prevalent in plenty of mobile apps. Google Chrome on iOS is a shining example. Safari, as well. You can make a reasonable assumption that users scrolling down are reading content, and thusly have no need for the menu bar. What I'm seeing from your perspective is that you're failing to recognize that "losing your place" in order to reveal the menu is a complete change of task. By bringing back the menu, or even using it if it were in place statically, your task and intent has shifted. If you've decided to abort your menu task and revert to reading content, it provides less cognitive friction to let the user scroll themselves back to their original place. My question to you is - what logical sense does it make to stop reading an article midway through and begin interacting with the menu, unless your intent is to navigate away from the content itself? And if it makes sense to you to do this, why do you find yourself changing and aborting tasks so swiftly? Are there other interactions that you've failed to discover that might be beneficial (tap and hold to get a menu, for example)? TL;DR - you're bitching about an edge case.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - rrrx3 12y ago
    Again, I'll reiterate - scrolling is frictionless. > Secondly, even if I am changing tasks, that doesn't mean ruining the state I leave in it is an acceptable side effect. Your browser history isn't corrupted when you leave Firefox. That's a stretch. Ruining? You can still scroll down. The affordances of these actions means, at most, you're going to have to touch the screen once more to "get back to where you were." If you're using an application that doesn't provide the menu after a short swipe, that's a fair enough issue to raise with the implementation of the pattern, not with the pattern itself. It doesn't surprise me that you encountered it on FF Mobile, because FF has a longstanding tradition of ripping things off from successful UIs and getting them wholly wrong in their implementations. > I can hardly believe the question needs to be asked, but it would be more appropriate to say "what logical sense does it make to bind scrolling to menu actions?" (The answer is none, which is why we didn't have this feature until now, and won't have it for long.) That's your opinion. Unfortunately for you in this case, it's wrong. Try it on iOS Chrome / Android Chrome or Safari and see how it's done properly before making a sweeping judgment on the interaction pattern itself.

Pxtl 12y ago

I honestly loathe the "scroll up bar" feature in Chrome browser because it throws off my instincts about how to interact with the UI. If something auto-hides into the top of the screen, my instinct is to pull it down from the top if I want to see it again. That just brings up the Android notification system.

emsy 12y ago

The worst implementation I've seen was for a desktop only web application. The navigation bar was only expanded when the scrollbar was at the very top. For very long pages they implemented a button that scrolls the user back to the top of the page so the navigation bar expands and the user can navigate. In the meantime, the horizontal space went mainly unused. The boss saw the IBM page and wanted the menus like this.

WickyNilliams 12y ago

Someone has already mentioned my JS lib to handle this below, but as the author I feel compelled to mention it myself with some additional explanation. I built headroom.js [0] to handle exactly this. It simply adds classes at scroll up or down so you can be as fancy as you want (or not!) with the show hide effect. You can set a custom offset (eg. Don't invoke the hide/show mechanism until 100px down the page), you can set a tolerance (eg. Must have scrolled more than 10px before hide/show) and a few other features for more advanced usage. And for fun I built a little playground so you can explore the various features and find a configuration you like [1] [0] http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/ http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/ [1] http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/playroom/ http://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/playroom/ (meta: I submitted it here, but it never gained traction, someone else submitted it to designer news and it absolutely blew up, can't believe it almost has 4000 stars!)

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
hiphopyo 12y ago
Keep it up!! Honestly you deserve more stars..

dkrich 12y ago

The problem is that he's assuming the primary goal of the site's UI is to make reading the content as enjoyable and efficient an experience as possible. Sadly, that's rarely the case. A site like Forbes gets paid every time you click through to another article. Once you've landed on an article and you're reading it, your value to them has been expended. Thus they have almost a diametrically-opposed interest to yours- you want to read the content uninterrupted, and they want you to click another link.

dredmorbius 12y ago
One of the many insidious ways in which advertising (and the business practices resulting from it) is overtly harmful.

rl3 12y ago

Firefox Browser for Android's default settings requires you to scroll up somewhat rapidly on the page you're currently reading to reveal the browser's auto-hidden URL bar and menu. I tend to loathe this functionality because it means slightly losing my place every time I want to multitask when reading something. I suppose it wouldn't be so bad as part of a website when viewed from a desktop environment, because you can easily highlight where you left off on the page much easier than you can on a tablet, for example.

0h139 12y ago
You can disable this behavior by unchecking the checkbox in Settings -> Display -> Scroll title bar.
- rl3 12y ago
  Good point, thanks!

wurzelgogerer 12y ago

i agree with the post. but i just noticed on my desktop chrome browser that medium also applies the same behavior on here. i believe this is not necessary, as on a desktop i have plenty of reading space and this way im actually experiencing a less usable version of a website....

fdsary 12y ago

After being into this field for quite a while now, I feel like there are no better web design than no web design. Plain html works great on any device, is very readable, accessible and lightweight. There's nothing to lose in having 0 loc css.

err4nt 12y ago
I wouldn't say 0 loc CSS is nothing to lose, I've been using Markdown to format some really basic notes, and here's my stylesheet for styling markdown documents: http://staticresource.com/styledown.css http://staticresource.com/styledown.css It's still a work-in-progress, but it's great for documenting my code as I work on websites. Here's a demo page with some tests of the markdown output I generated on the command-line using pandoc: http://staticresource.com/misc/demo.html http://staticresource.com/misc/demo.html I'm grabbing web fonts from Google. It's responsive and reads well on desktop, tablet, and phone. The styles still work offline (with no web fonts) There isn't a whole ton of CSS there (I work with files 500 loc CSS up to 5k or 7k a a time. I whipped this up in one morning because I was tired of my IDE's markdown live preview, so now I have folders on my server that are watched, and any time I save a markdown file it automatically regenerates the HTML in the same folder. Anyway, you can't say there's NOTHING to lose having 0 loc CSS. Here's what that same markdown demo that looks like with no CSS: http://staticresource.com/misc/demohtml.html http://staticresource.com/misc/demohtml.html Think they are equivalent?

beloch 12y ago

Dear website developers, I'm sorry your feelings were hurt when I declined to install your wonderful app that offers access to your website. Perhaps I just wasn't open to the awesome possibilities your app was offering me, but I already have a web browser that works just fine and couldn't be arsed to install more stuff. It's not you, it's me. I'm a bad, bad person. I get it. Now, about your "Scroll Up Bar"... It is indeed a very fine looking user interface, but my web browser already has one. I just can't seem to stop doing things that hurt your feelings, but could you please give me the option to turn that thing off? If you're really having trouble justifying your job, perhaps I can help you out with a small suggestion. You may have noticed a trend towards wider aspect ratio screens over the last few years. Screens have gotten so bloody wide that practically nobody wants to read a column of text that is fully as wide as their screen! People were designing websites with UI elements on the sides even back when screens were slender 1.33:1 twigs instead of the McDonald's super-sized behemoths we have on our desks today. Perhaps you should take your bar, rotate it 90 degrees, and stick it on the side where there's space for it! Sincerely, An ungrateful, lazy, bad person who just can't be pleased.

bobbles 12y ago

I loathe what The Verge has done when browsing the site on an iPad. That awful little black box stays stuck in the middle of my screen, and even selecting close just makes it a smaller black box in the middle of my screen.

coldnebo 12y ago

Dear website users, We feel your pain. It may not seem like it since we develop ever more complicated UI schemes to overcome the W3C's frankenstandards (seriously, who comes up with a coordinate system based on a 'nominal arms length away' from the screen and then creates another set of units for mobile. I know there's a lot of smart people who contribute great data standards from the W3C, but when it came to presentation standards they either 1) completely forgot their linear algebra or 2) didn't bother to look at Postcript's coordinate system or both). Some of us are reinventing the browser as it should have been written (with polyfills and shims), but this will take a while to get right. (For those that remember, Alan Kay originally said there should be no browser, just a code container, we are once again getting close to something he said decades before). We understand that the W3C has set the expectation that everything bad on the web happens because of us devs not following their "standards" (even when alt changes to title changes to picture caption in as many years), but at some point it might be worth asking them "why are your presentation standards so inconsistent and hard to follow?" Sincerely, A webdev who is tired of cajoling CSS and JS to reinvent the same god-damned three column layout that should have worked in the 90's (oh wait, you didn't realize that Postscript predates the web? Yes, yes it did. So the W3C could have sought presentation layer experts of its time in drafting presentation standards, but didn't).

_cipher_ 12y ago

Simpler solution: every keyboard has a 'Home' button -> MAGIC. ;)