Yeah but you could scroll your window horizontally to only keep the useful column visible.
Now it's "HEY I SEE YOUR SCREEN ISN'T WIDE ENOUGH TO FIT TWO COLUMNS OF ADVERTISING ON THE SIDES. HAVE THE CELL PHONE LAYOUT WITH FULLSCREEN POPUPS INSTEAD!"
Now it's "HEY I SEE YOUR SCREEN ISN'T WIDE ENOUGH TO FIT TWO COLUMNS OF ADVERTISING ON THE SIDES. HAVE THE CELL PHONE LAYOUT WITH FULLSCREEN POPUPS INSTEAD!"
If you are a small operation that still makes your mobile web site usable, then power to you.
It really should be handled at the OS level for apps, or at the browser level for web sites: If I click anything on the screen, it should react as if I clicked on what was there 300ms ago, maybe 400 or 500ms or longer.
The fastest (typical) human reaction is around 300ms. If I'm clicking on something that appeared less than 300ms ago, then I'm NOT intending to click on it. Maybe the delay should be configurable, or maybe it learns the behavior for a particular user? An elderly person surfing the web might have a 1000ms propagation delay between deciding to click and clicking on a button or link. But my reflexes are closer to the 300ms point if not better on a good day.
No matter how fast a human is, if a button is covered by an ad 100-200ms before they click, there's no way to not click on it. And that's bad UI.
Even my (our?) favorite search engine, Duck Duck Go, is guilty of this: I will frequently accidentally click on the "WikiPedia summary" popup which has just replaced the actual top link that I wanted to be clicking on. Bad web duck!
From what I've read it's more like 200-250ms, but hardware lag does bring the end-to-end closer to 300ms.
300ms is a good lower limit, though, if you take into account complex video processing and standard brain activity when browsing; when hitting a button when you're browsing, your brain isn't wound up and ready to react as quickly as possible. Getting that extra fast reaction really requires short circuiting some of the mental processing you'd normally do. I'm pretty sure I'm remembering 300ms from the cognitive science/UI classes I took in college.
And don't forget the hardware lag in your own body. ;) The signal to click the button takes ~10ms to get from your brain to your fingers. When you think about things like sports where the accuracy of, say, releasing a ball when throwing it, needs to be in the 0.1ms range to hit your target, but your brain is actually giving the command 10ms before the ideal release time... Makes my brain hurt just contemplating how it works.
Pro tip: Don't think about this while trying to throw a ball accurately.
EDIT: While we're at it, there's a publishing group that displays all news articles as popovers over the main page. People accidentally click out of the articles and get dumped on the home page, containing expensive "site takeover" advertisements.
Can't remember the name of the company - they have a bunch of US-based local news sites.
I swear the the delay between appearing and sliding up is always timed and changed each day to cunningly coincide with my finger tapping on the area where the 'start' button used to be so that I almost always tap the 'pay us $$$' button instead !!!