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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

"Let's click on this link... ah, not that link, let's go back. Yes, this link... NO! STOP MOVING!"

This is my #1 complaint about reddit. Not due to fonts; but rather when I load reddit on my phone, a "get the reddit app" banner appears... timed perfectly so that my attempt to view my messages sends me off to the app store.

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Heck, this is my #1 complaint of almost anything on a mobile browser. It's easily the worst offender when it comes to mobile in general; I wish browser vendors put a bigger focus on fixing this, somehow.

Didn't this start on the desktop and now because companies think it was successful on desktops, they need to extend it to mobile since they think everyone has 4G service?

I remember when your mobile experience was supposed to be a stripped down faster version of your desktop version. Now, they're both insanely hard to navigate and use.

So much for we dev progression, huh?

I used to get the mobile versions of pages on the desktop. Not because I was on a slow connection, just because the text is the meat for most things on the Internet. Now there's less of a point in doing that.

Google is fixing it, but it's punishing them in search, not Chrome.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/08/google-to-punish-sit...

Google also has tech to show these banners but only if you've visited the same site a few times already, and then not every time. (This link talks about web app installs first, then native app installs later)

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/increasing...

"The user has visited your site twice over two separate days during the course of two weeks."

Which will lead to the same hack as paywalled news sites, the ads won't load when referred from google meanwhile the rest will suffer.

So users reaching a site through google have a better experience than users accessing it through some other method? This seems like a pretty good thing from Google's perspective...

Absolutely, and further extends their embrace over the web.

I suspect google are probably wary about moves that push themselves much further right now, the last thing they want to do is look like a monopoly.

Sounds like a good reason to build a plugin to always sets the http referrer header to google.com on certain news sites.

Is there any good reason for having the "Referer:" tag at all?

Google itself displays an anoying translate this page popup that obscures content, especially when you are browsing in incognito mode.

Browser vendors against adclicks, mice against cheese, bees against honey, what you gonna do now?

Mice aren't really interested in cheese.

Exactly. They're masters of subtlety, manipulating our species to evolve in just the right way, learn just the right things. We don't experiment on them so much as they experiment on us.

Masters of subtlety...

Mice likes cheese, but only if cheese is good. Most of current cheeses are made from fresh milk, which is not fermented enough to be edible.

Please, describe how this "mouse" consumes anything other than "cheese" for sustenance.

Actually, I think he meant it literally:

http://www.earthkind.com/blog/fact-or-fiction-do-mice-really...

What a great example of really bad webfont. That page almost broke my eyes, when saving island of bold fb comments came to the rescue. People lost in thin-line madness.

I guess my link was more relevant than I thought!

I'm starting to suspect that behavior is intentional. I see this all the time with mobile ads... a site slowly loads as I read content, then an ad pops up right when I try to navigate. Incredibly frustrating.

It's like advertisers want me to install adblock... so I will, I'll root my device and adblock all their bullshit forever.

That's so annoying. Worst thing is that adblocks are not as easily available as in desktops. I'm on windows phone 10, my only browser is Edge, so I'm really fucked.

Set up pihole or similar at home and none of your devices will see ads. It's great fun and makes a nice difference on mobile.

Thanks for the suggestion, but it doesn't seem good for me. Blocking things at DNS level, can be counterproductive. Maybe there's a false positive that's been blocked and it will probably a headache to find it.

I don't think I've ever experienced this. Perhaps the lists I was using were just particularly conservative.

It's pretty easy to whitelist a whole domain... the domains on the lists are pretty comprehensively ad-related. Your call, but it certainly is one solution.

This makes it all the more regrettable that Microsoft buried the competition and you are stuck with Windows forever: http://developers-club.com/posts/104034/

Best suggestion I've seen on this: click events apply to whatever had been in the location ~300ms BEFORE you selected it. Turns out humans can't respond much more quickly than that.

I wish I could credit the source but I don't recall -- HN or Reddit probably.

I'm also still not sure this solves the full problem. On mobile, there's generally the problem that a touch and a drag are two different actions, but they're not clearly distinguished. There's a tremendous amount of ambiguity over just where you can or cannot touch on a given web page to accomplish a click, and increasingly pages have very few "safe" whitespace zones.

Examples coming to mind: Chrome/Android history -- the delete-item 'x' will also open the link in the current browser tab. I've found clearing history to be tedious (there's no way to select multiple items, or a date range, say -- you can only delete items one-at-a-time, and not too fast...). On YouTube/Mobile, the entire panel of a search result is a clickable zone, making scrolling the page without inadvertently opening a video you're not interested in all but impossible.

It's abysmally poor UI/UX in both cases.

I'm convinced this page-jumps-as-you're-about-to-touch is a dark pattern to some clickbait time-waster sites use to get more mobile ad clicks. Just when I'm about to click 'Next' to see the 7th-of-53 stoopid-photos-taken-at-Walmart an ad link jumps to be right under my finger.

You gotta stop going to those sites. :)

Firewall them -- on the device or router. It's what all the cool kids are doing these days.

This even happens on Youtube, on a 200 mbit+ connection - I go to a page, and just as I reach over to click a link some stylesheet finally shows up and everything moves up by twenty pixels.

Same thing with the Facebook app; whenever you're searching for something, it shows the result you want, but then like 0.5-1 second later it pops up a different result above it so you tap the wrong thing. Drives me insane.

I get around this by not going to Facebook except when a relative or friend dies or the zombie apocalypse starts.

Ugh, I feel you. I've trained myself not to tap on a result unless I've waited several seconds. Life improved immeasurably.

Member when YouTube used to do that with search results except it was an ad

Why aren't you using Reddit Sync yet? Who uses the mobile site these days anyway?

For me it's about tabs. Can't stand when an app opens a URL in a mini browser inside itself. If it's a web link just open it in the damn browser!

There's an option to open the website in external browser, chrome tab or internal browser. Not only in Reddit Sync (which is great), but in every other Reddit app as well.

Btw, opening the website in the Chrome tab is basically the same (session state, cookies are same) as opening it in Chrome, it's just way faster - specially on RAM challenged devices.

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