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Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

The worst is when you start scrolling and an ad "lazily loads" under your finger, using your touch to switch you out of the browser and onto an app store page. It makes you reluctant to even start interacting with a page before you're sure it's done loading.

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This infuriates me to no end. I just cannot believe that it's even allowed to kick a user out of their browser and into an app store without their express interaction.

The browser considers your touch (which you intended to scroll the page) an "express interaction". A policy from a simpler time!

I encounter this on page loads frequently, before I've even touched the screen. I also encounter it from ads inside certain news apps (which actually angers me more than the browser, if only a little).

Perhaps the express interaction is using my phone?

The relative rarity (IME) of appstore-jacking causes me to believe it's closely related to ad-network malware delivery. Perhaps a test for more nefarious future ads, but I'm inclined to blame unfixed ad network vulnerabilities.

Why is it any different than redirecting to a different webpage?

No back button.

There is since iOS 9. It also has popups before navigating out of the browser, but yeah, what a web these days.

For YouTube videos, but I noticed suspiciously not for Twitter.

They're both obnoxiously shitty. You wanted to load one resource, and then are redirected to a different, unwanted resource by an ad? That's asshole behavior. It's particularly worse when you're redirected out of the app you're using and into another one.

Nobody wants to be redirected by an ad to something they didn't ask for.

Lifehacker.com is horrible about lazy loading and scroll jank.

All of Gawker's sites are, Kotaku is practically unreadable on my Galaxy S6 on wifi, it's preposterous.

Take the hint then ;P

Also pretty much every townnews-type C-grade whitelabel news site.

I thought touch/scroll events were distinguished thus:

Finger down -> finger up = touch

Finger down -> move -> finger up = scroll

How does a scroll get interpreted as a touch? It sounds like a bug to me.

The ads pop up right underneath your finger in the lag between deciding to scroll and your finger touching the screen to drag. With the page jerking around underneath you that seems to end up being classified as a click rather than a drag, and away you go to whatever piece of crap you really don't care about.

I believe it's because JS is still loading and the scroll isn't registered until it springs to life and sees only a touch.

Pages can override the default interactions using touch event handlers.

That is bad! I get terrible scroll tracking lag, too.

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