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Comment by SippinLean | Hacker News Reader

Combine this with the recent surge of sticky footers as well, especially on small/mobile devices. Vice is a particularly bad offender: http://i.imgur.com/ltqYRX9.png

That's a 60px sticky header + a 50px sticky footer on a 480px-tall screen. 23% of my screen space is lost to sticky elements. The footer is only two buttons, "Share" and "Tweet".

Every time you scroll down, the header slides up, and then back down again. It's an incredibly distracting experience.

The icing on the cake is the ad in the middle of the article, it's in an iframe that hijacks your scrolling, until you swipe through all 5 slides you cannot continue scrolling through the article.

Why would I ever subject myself to consuming content this way?!

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Been using Firefox mobile for a while now with uBlock Origin... Creating rules to hide annoying elements on sites that I use a lot.

Most times when I try to browse pages on a family members phone I want to throw it... Guess I really don't know how bad things are most of the time.

I'm usually just bitching about the sites that are sniffing for webkit UA's and therefore don't show me a mobile experience.

Related: looks like direct links to imgur-hosted images now redirect to html content that have... semi-sticky headers and footers.

Maybe only on mobile. When I tell Firefox to load the desktop version, it goes directly to the image. Normally I would say that loading a HTML page plus an image instead of just an image seems like a strange choice for mobile. However, it does seem that the HTML version pulls a resized image. The source URL has a "maxwidth" parameter, so there's probably some bandwidth savings in there.

The site could just as easily serve you the resized image directly instead of an HTML page which will then embed the same resized image. I've already seen Imgur tell the difference between page visits and appearing in src="", so it wouldn't need to break anything.

Only when the request includes a referer. Without one, it just loads the image.

Reader view on iOS Safari makes the web usable on mobile.

For my fellow Android users out there, Firefox also has a reader mode.

For me, it's more like "reading mode on Firefox makes the web usable" on all devices.

https://outline.com if reader mode not available -- works in pretty much any (JS-supporting) browser.

A small set of sites fail to render, including Google's Blogspot, using dynamic themes, which are abominations to the Web. No "fix this site's fucked CSS / styling" tools seem to be able to handle that.

Clever. Thanks for sharing.

I just leave those sites immediately. It's too infuriating.

If I'm honest, I usually don't mind the slide up and down header if the navigation is there, means that it is always close by. I do disagree with sticky footers though, especially if it adds no value to me as the user.

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