Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbcurtis | Hacker News Reader

Is there a readable version of the web site that doesn't have obnoxious scrolling? Someone needs to tell their designers about the Principle of Least Surprise. I'll look at this after they fix this so it doesn't give me a headache.

View on HN

I normally frown upon people getting too hung up on page design on HN, but this one I gotta admit is a real WTF'er. When you "scroll" down, it's doing page loads, and filling up browser history. Back back back back back back. Worse still, you think you've backed through all those page loads, and you find out it's one of those sites that keeps you from backing out of their site! We used to call this "breaking the back button" and Google used to discourage it.

Hell hath no fury like a HNer scorned by the inability to use their back button to bounce straight back to HN.

You have summarized it perfectly. I too fell prey to the anger from the broken back button.

This being said, I look forward to advanced imaging and the analysis Terra Bella will bring.

I got smacked with the broken back button too. Had to close the tab, re-load HN and find my place again.

I'm going to guess this is probably not intentional on their end. They're probably aware of the issue, but likely it's a side-effect of an architectural decision that was made previously and hard to un-make now.

How does an unusable page like this even pass preliminary design review? Perhaps the page works well on the 16-core desktop computers with giant monitors common in the ivory tower.

I'm not going to defend the design choices here but it performs fine on my four year old laptop running Firefox/Ubuntu, so it requires neither a very powerful hardware, nor Chrome which is a more common failure mode.

I agree. Viewed it on a chromebook and the site performance was fine.

On my very beefy computer, but with a 10 Mbps connection the experience is kind of shitty - it takes around half a second after a "scroll" for the content to appear.

It runs fine on my "ancient" 2008 TP X200. The problem is the hijacking of scrolling, and the back button...

Runs like a bag of shit on my specced out Macbook Pro in Chrome.

It's sluggish on my desktop i7/970 combo.

3 year old MBA, Safari and it runs well.

I made the mistake of clicking on the link while my kids were playing Minecraft PvP in the next room. Cue anguished shouts of "I'm lagging!" for the 30 seconds or so I spent staring at the loading icon.

7 year old iMac with a dodgy GPU, and I crashed and burned. Can only run in safe mode now.

While this is a not-uncommon occurrence for me, it's really freaking annoying.

iPhone 6S Plus - mobile safari crashed 3 times before I gave up

Yep, totally broken for me on iOS.

It doesn't crash on my iPhone 6 Plus, but it's practically unusable. 5-10 seconds of waiting for it to respond to trying to swipe down, and horrible frame rates while it does so.

There: http://pastebin.com/raw/kYpdLgYg

Thanks. Seriously. I enjoyed reading that.

Wow. That was infinitely more readable. Better UX.

It's responsive too!

Jesus google. Politely: get your shit together before putting the webpage up.

Forget whether it breaks the back button. I'm going to say it again because apparently companies need it repeated: scrolling is annoying in itself, but I can't scroll without it breaking.

I scroll down, ok.

Wait, did a menu just appear at the top of my screen out of nowhere?

I keep scrolling down...

I scroll back up... wait a second...there's all these other pages I'm viewing now that I've never even seen before on the way down...what happened?

Ok, those little nav button things on the right hand side of my screen? Well apparently, I can't actually scroll to the bottom one...it just never gets there.

Wait no, I can get to the bottom one, if i start on the top one and scroll down, because apparently that makes me skip the other middle two buttons somehow, but if i click on the middle two buttons and scroll down, although i hit the bottom of the page, it still says i'm not at the bottom of the third nav-button. "What's going on?" i say to myself... Holy cow, wait...there's two nav buttons...a bar on the top and dots on the side?

All right, screw this, its broken, i'll just refresh and start from the beginning...oh no...refresh didn't bring me back to the beginning at all because I'm not actually on the original URL...

Sweet mercy...university lecture material example of how NOT to do a webpage anyone? And a google product at that?

What happened google?

Edit: and the bugs keep piling up the more I look at it, your Terabella link in the top left, not only does it duplicate the links in the other two navigation panes, but it doesn't work! It's taken me to two separate screens now!

Sorry, I'm in an angry mood today, but seriously...

This fad has got to stop.

The worst part was trying to Back. Just scrolling actually adds a bunch of URLs to your back queue, so when you want to back out of the URL, you end up hitting back like ten times. :/

I suppose New Tab would be my best friend here so I can just X it, but weird abuse of basic browser functionality should be shamed.

>The worst part was trying to Back. Just scrolling actually adds a bunch of URLs to your back queue

How does that happen?

One way is by using JS to change the address bar location using window.location or history.pushState(), instead of using history.relpaceState() which doesn't create an extra history entry each time.

I would vote for a president that ran a campaign _only_ based on quirky punishments for those who use history.pushState()

They should have to open a door repeatedly, only to have someone push them back when they try to walk through for a few weeks, for example!

Great idea. I would vote for that too. Like Sisyphus ...

Edit: spelling.

Got it, thanks. I think I've been experiencing similar stuff on some sites for the last few days, but my attention was more on the page topic, also may have thought that it was an issue with my mouse (that I had to click a few times to go to previous page). So it's good to know.

If you try using your browser's scrollbar their js fights back too...

I was surprised too -- I have the high-end 15" Retina MacBook with dedicated graphics and I couldn't get the page to perform after scrolling past the first part at all. It was slow, laggy and kept dropping frames. Very odd. Cool site, but it appears it isn't working as intended, as my dedicated graphics kept turning on and off.

My guess is that this was outsourced to some big agency that tried way too hard to design something cool and unique. What surprises me is that the internal Google team would look at this and find it acceptable. Anyone know which agency did it or if it was in fact an internal team?

I smite this page with the fury of a thousand developers cursing internet explorer 6.

This page is trash! I'm sure that there is some interesting info there but after hijacking my scrolling, and browsing history, I just don't care about it.

At least you got that far... using Google's Chrome to see Google's Terra Bella first time resulted in an "Aw, Snap" crash in Chrome before I got to the scrolling. Now I get there, but not without Chrome's "Rats! WebGL Hit a snag!" error.

From the sounds of it, it would have been more painful if everything worked.

This sort of fake scrolling also means that Chrome extensions like Full Screen Page Capture don't work.

Opening it up in lynx did wonders.

This isn't a product, it's an advertisement. Surprise is sometimes (often?) useful in advertising.

Yes, "View Source".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com