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Comment by Mirioron | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty funny, but God do I hate back to the top buttons.

I'm reading a story on a page with a back to the top button. I get distracted in real life and change the grip on my phone. I look back at my phone to continue reading and I'm at the top of the page. Now I have to find where I was again.

I've probably lost more time from accidentally hitting the back to the top button than the button has saved me time. This has made me paranoid about those buttons and I definitely prefer sites not to have them. Sometimes I switch to desktop mode on my phone just so I don't have that button on the screen.

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Me too! My phone already has a built-in “back to top” button. I don’t need your ugly 0.5 opacity CSS circle occluding my view of the content.

I’m not sure I’ve ever clicked (or tapped) one of those buttons. The same complaint applies to share bars, and honestly, sticky headers as well. I really prefer to just read the content and let my browser handle the chrome.

I really hate them on iOS, because the system comes with back-to-top functionality so all these buttons are doing are looking ugly and covering part of the page. And don’t even get me started on when AMP breaks scrolling…

For anyone else who was wondering, you can tap the top of the address bar on iOS Safari. I think it has to be expanded first. I didn’t know that and hope it helps.

(This works through the system, by the way; it’s not just limited to Safari.)

It works just about anywhere, actually. Just tap the time (or tap the earpiece, on a notched phone) to scroll to the top. Works in Safari, Chrome, Messages, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter... the list of exceptions is short.

I just want to take a moment to give a shoutout to the Tweetbot devs, which expanded on iOS’ back-to-top functionality:

Tapping the top of the page again takes you back to your scroll position! Incredibly useful for recovering from accidental taps, and I kind of wish iOS would copy it, since it happens more often than I’d like.

The Apollo reddit app also does this! Really great feature when I want to go back up to look at the content again and then go back to the comment I was reading.

Interesting!

I always thought that re-scrollback was just a feature of iOS. I use it all the time in Apollo. But it doesn't seem to work in the Reminders app, nor the Notes app. Way to go Tweetbot and Apollo devs!

Except on AMP pages.

Fuck AMP.

This is interesting, I've often found the buttons to be useful at times on mobile, so was wondering where all the hate came from, and turns out it was because iOS already has the feature built-in (I use Android, which doesn't really have an equivalent afaik).

Though to play devil's advocate, I'm willing to bet 80%+ of iOS users have no idea the feature even exists, so removing it just because it's available as a system feature doesn't sound like a particularly compelling argument to me.

I think having some kind of sticky navigation instead of scroll to top makes for a much more compelling UX though, since it accomplishes the same goal without the downsides of hitting it by accident causing an irreversible loss of context.

They really should only be at the bottom of an article, less annoying then in my opinion.

I think this is just problem in general with touch devices. Also the way modern apps are designed, where almost everything is button, does not help. See mobile twitter, for example, close to 100% of the screen is link of button that does something.

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