Comment by justsaysmthng | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justsaysmthng | Hacker News Reader

Meta comment / rant about the bloomberg website.

What's the matter with these web sites these days ?

When did everyone decide that good old scrolling is too old fashioned, so now the simple act of swiping the mouse to scroll down, results in totally surprising and confusing consequences - such as resizing and moving the video, pausing it if I scroll too much and then restarting it if I scroll back up..

Scrollbar position ? Ignore that - it tells you absolutely nothing - because there is the mega cool "infinite scrolling" feature ! Which by the way replaces current video with another one, which starts buffering and playback starts only later, when I've scrolled away or switched tabs..

And of course there's the unscrollable, unremovable top header - a sort of screen real estate tax you have to pay for the "bloomberg" logo and .. Surprise ! A horizontal scrollbar showing the vertical position in current article !

What a mess ...

Sorry for the rant, but I'm sure I'm not alone in my 'suffering' and this is a trend I've noticed on many websites, since they copy each other anyway...

/Rant

I caught this hint from HN comments, so I thought you might enjoy it. The bookmarklet Kill Sticky Headers restores your ability to read using the space-bar, removes annoying fixed objects etc. Once I started using the bookmarklet, I couldnt stop:

https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

This! Large sticky header is the worst design trend in web design. Google does it too, Gmail, Groups. Google Groups is the worst with 3 levels of fixed large headers, taking up 1/4 to 1/3 of the laptop screen.

Edit: Kill Sticky Headers doesn't work with them :(. Looks like they are iframe. Is there a kill outer iframe?

Ya, me too, it mostly works great. Sometimes the web page becomes unresponsive (to all input), so I have to refresh it and try again.

I browse with Javascript disabled by default (NoScript), and it makes it much less painful.

Although there is the odd case of a completely broken design that even Firefox Reader cannot detect, it does save me many other issues, and makes everything load much faster!

uBlock origin in advanced mode is good for this. So you can toggle certain primary JS scripts to get some sites functional. Then saving the setup for future use. Over time you get to the point where 99% of sites are fully usable while still blocking the vast majority of JS.

NoScript can do this too. You have the choice to activate certain scripts permanently (of course you can deactivate them later again if you want), or you can even activate them only for the current session and the next time you start the browser the temporary activated scripts are blocked again.

Except it's easier to just use uBlock Origin for everything. The grid approach is far more intuitive than the text list you get with NoScript (IMO).

Major differences are:

- In uBlock Origin you can allow/block on a per-site basis with one click -- you do not need to allow one specific domain everywhere. (I am aware NoScript's ABE can get the same result, but that requires more than a single click.)

- You can block on a 1st-/3rd-party basis. I consider the default blocking of 3rd-party scripts while allowing 1st-party scripts to be the optimal solution for cutting bloat with less web page breakage. Now keeping 1st point in mind, this means one could allow all 3rd-party scripts on one specific site, while keeping them blocked everywhere else by default.

- Whatever is not taken care by dynamic filtering will fall onto static filtering, i.e. even if one end up allowing 3rd-party scripts, the static filters will pick up the task of blocking nuisance scripts.

This sounds really nice, especiialy the possibility to easily block scripts for a single site. That NoScript by default activates the scripts on all sites is sometimes annoying. It seems I need to take a closer look at uBlock Origin.

I second that. I browse, guessing, about 95% of the public web with NoScript + uBlock on and unless the content that doesn't work without JS is especially crucial to what I'm doing at the moment, I'll just leave the page that won't render/work properly and look it up elsewhere, without a second breath.

But that sometimes makes for really bizarre experiences watching other people browse the same websites, cursing at how slow, bloated or broken they are, seeing that until now I didn't even know that the particular website that I've been visiting for years can do THAT.

The Bloomberg site is a really good example of it - for the first time I've turned the JavaScript on for it and... WHOA.

It's like every single piece of that 'extra' JavaScript functionality serves just one single purpose - to make your time spent on the site reading the articles as much miserable as possible.

I probably don't even want to know what I'm missing elsewhere...

What's amazing as well is the number of ad server requests this site sends. I've never seen my adblocker number get into the 30's before, but I guess there's a first for everything.

It's not suprising that Bloomberg has more business people to push back on the designers/technical staff in this regard.

Having been on the other end of this fight to keep ads to a minimum as to not damage UX, it's a difficult fight over time as the number of 'business people' in the operation grow in size faster than technical teams. Plus the added pressure from the very top to keep increasing financial output increasing.

This is why I tell people that being a good designer often means being good at saying no. Particularly at larger institutions.

What are you using? I only caught 12 :/

keep scrolling ;-)

Astounded that the top comment is about meta-fucking-web.

This is a huge story. It has enormous impact, economically, politically, socially. We're seeing centralised ownership through the back door, via the mechanism which started out as "QE", and is now morphing into an all-engulfing zombie policy maker devouring free markets. And you don't need to be a free market fundamentalist to at least see that this is huge.

But...you see only a meta-UI bbg website angle? Oh brother. Wake up, get out of your tech hypnosis. In case you hadn't noticed, in the past 12 months tech lost its special-snowflake status and is now exposed to the same macro factors, including this one, as all other industries. You owe it to yourself and your stakeholders to start seeing much further than the web stack here.

Meh. It could have linked to a website that doesn't suck so bad.

Remember Ebola ? The war in Ukraine ? Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 ? Paris terror attacks ?

January 2016 the oil slipped below $30 with long term low prices predicted by all experts.. Shanghai index collapsed for several days in a row. China slows down - China bubble is bursting - The world is entering recession.

Every week there's a huge story. They come and go.

You also have to realize that news media are weapons used in geopolitical and economic wars - a big part of what's reported has some sort of secondary goals. Even a minor shift in perception can translate into millions gained on the stock markets.

You owe it to yourself to see past all the informational pop corn that the media is producing and realize how little it matters wether you know the "huge" story or not.

no this is a major shift in how we are governed, it's creeping up multi-decade, and has huge future ramifications. It is literally the breakdown of everything we have taken for granted in economic governance in the past 100 years, and it telegraphs the kind of inflection point that leads to very big structural changes in society.

I'd call it one of those Thomas Kuhn style paradigm shifts in the making, this time applied to the sphere of economics.

It's not about a temporary price move, disease outbreak, or natural disaster, all of which are, I agree, all too regular.

I have said this about many websites recently, but design/front-end dev teams have to to justify their existence through constant "progress".

However you choose to define progress is up to you, but when your boss asks you about the Q3 roadmap you better have some answers.

After I paused the AUTOPLAYING video the page reloaded itself and started playing it again. Nice way to screw over advertisers and increase for fake pageviews. Not to mention piss all over the users attempting to browse the site.

Yeah, I especially hate how the page-down/up is inconsistent with the viewable part of the page -- it pages down as if you could see the stuff behind the un-moveable header, which makes it go too far.

In firefox there the book icon aka reader view and it works with this site. /rant What is odd, that I had the same reading experience. I thought it was the fault of my choice for using firefox. I would like to work with only people who feel sorry for their existence. And the ceo at the Kafka company resides in a bunker, safe place for her/him and us. /rant

Even worse is the blogger thing of swipe right/left takes you to the next/previous post. Zoomed in and looking around? Surprise! Youre on another page! This seems to break every reasonable expectation of good navigation design and I hate it with a vengeance.

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