Comment by yourduskquibble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yourduskquibble | Hacker News Reader

yourduskquibble

I just saw this thread, and honestly it is probably too late to get noticed by many, but I'm attempting to 'unsuck the web' with my project[0] by pinning "sticky" website elements where they belong - i.e. the website header shouldn't steal your screen real estate and scroll down the page with you.

My project/uBO filter list removes the "annoying" elements noted above as well as other "features" of websites (e.g. social share bars, cookie notices, etc) through a filter list that works with uBlock Origin.

I update the list often, and admittedly am probably entering into an arms race but I'm just really sick of websites hijacking (what I think) the web was built for (information).

Feel free to subscribe to the filter list by pasting the URL below[1] into the 'Custom' section under the '3rd-party filters' tab of uBlock Origin.

This filter list also works on mobile Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin installed.

[0] Project Homepage https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances

[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoya...

Could you add/did you add killing the annoying "call to action" pop-up dialog? You know, you visit an article and BAM! A fullscreen modal asking to sign-up for their book newsletter? That would be awesome.

Also, the exit intent pop-ups. I, most of the time, just open a tab and switch to a different tab to read the current one later and then that Pop-up comes. It just annoys the hell out of me.

Even sometimes I don't pay much attention to it and when after reading other tabs I come back to this tab; all I see is that pop-up standing there, asking for attention. It even makes me forget why I even opened this tab in the first place and makes me leave immediately.

Yes, I add these to the list when I come across them.

Oh man, so annoying. Here's my immitation of the thought process of the marketing team that designed it: "enter your email address so we can continue sending you offers and adverts and all kinds of information on that thing that you clicked on that we are now blocking with this popup preventing you from reading even though you're just passing by".

I suppose the script that removes all of the 'would you like to receive desktop notifications from this website?' popups would be nice as well.

This is fantastic, thanks! I started using this "Kill Sticky Headers" [0] I saw on HN once and I find it very useful.

I'll give the ublock list a try.

[0] https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

> Finally, I just don't care right now about navigating your website, or following you on Twitter. I'm trying to read. Let me focus on that for now, please.

Your link is exactly right!

I am doing a redesign right now and they wanted one and I had to fight against it. Sure in the office we all have a few external monitors, but I'm a MBA user irl and they kill me

This is great. I wonder though, how much could you achieve just by creating 1 blanket rule: change every instance on a page of "position: fixed" to "position: absolute" - layout and nav should be more or less the same, across the board, but nothing will follow you down the page!

Kryptonite would be sticky footers, but if you're on a site that uses those you should just close the tab anyway. :)

This could mess up a lot of modals pretty badly.

I'd be ok with all modals going away to be honest.

I don't like a lot of them but sometimes they're needed for the site.

For example I'm working on one site now where a modal lets you sign in (which involves selecting from or searching through a long list of third parties) and if it wasn't a modal it would have to take you to a new page which would be a poor UX.

So long as they're not used for those awful "sign up for our mailing list" purposes, have been set up to work well on all browsers and viewport sizes, and are accessible, I think they can be okay.

My argument to that would be simply that you are wrong.

A new page is the correct UX design choice and with HTML5 features can make the experience seamless and far less jarring than a modal that needs heaps of testing to get right across all browsers and screen forms.

But that was essentially my original point. Modals, when used by sign up to spam are annoying. When used to do anything else they're essentially trying to replicate a desktop experience that quite frankly isn't required of a website - even on "web 2.0" or full on web applications.

Also, please link an example of a modal done well across all browsers / screen sizes. I simply have never seen one in the wild that works better than an inline page element would have.

Unfortunately, cosmetic filters that don't target a specific domain have performance implications[1] so I try to make every filter specific to a domain.

That being said I do have a few generic cosmetic filters as part of the list (you can see them near the top of the list) that don't target any specific domain but I don't use the "position: absolute" rule on any of them.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/1892

You also need to nuke "position: sticky" but otherwise, yeah. I never miss these elements.

I've been using a bookmarklet approach (named "FIXEDFIXER") that aggressively changes all `position:fixed` and `position:sticky`[0] to `position:static`. (I've posted the one-liner code a couple of times before already, can repost on request)

Quite often the stickied elements disappear entirely, possibly hidden below other elements or outside of the window--I've never felt the need to check where they go.

Which kind of illustrates my point; I hope your filter list is a whitelist, because in 99.9% of cases, absolutely nothing is lost from these sticky elements. I could've set them to `display:none` or removed them entirely and I think it will still cover my use case perfectly.

I don't think it would be so terrible if `fixed` and `sticky` would go the way of the blink-tag. Except that people would probably reimplement it with JS at expense of performance, because they like nagging people at cost of UX.

[0] it used to be just `fixed`, but `sticky` is used for the same webdisease

> Which kind of illustrates my point; I hope your filter list is a whitelist, because in 99.9% of cases, absolutely nothing is lost from these sticky elements.

My two cents is to automatically apply, but make sure to have a notice when it actually changed something. The only thing worse than a site not functioning correctly is when it's only not functioning correctly for you, and nobody has any idea why, including you.

On a related theme of annoyances, I use this extension to prevent auto-playing videos:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-autoplay-blo...

I had a very similar idea but to make a bookmarklet for use on mobile safari. Sometimes reader mode goes too far and I really just want to nuke all the sticky floating junk.

Check out http://staticding.com - same idea you have but I've found it doesn't always work when I've tested it.

Thank You! This is amazing and I love it.

Cool idea! Thanks for doing this.

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