Hacker News Reader

Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

People get bent out of shape when sites hijack their back button, but I dislike when they hijack my scrollbar and make me scroll through animations.

View on HN

Scrolljacking like this is just never a good idea, why do massive companies keep trying this? I can't imagine it improves their metrics. Go ahead and put your pictures and videos in there but let me read the damn page. It's not immersive, it's annoying.

It looks good in a conference room, and that's what the incentives of the designers optimize for.

You and I aren't the real customers of the artists that built this page, the people paying their consulting fees are.

I never minded animations in scrolljacking. I despise scrolljacking that just changes my scroll mechanics (speed up, slow down, alter acceleration) for no reason.

I suspect that the average person unfortunately responds better to (i.e. is more likely to buy after seeing) such a "fancy" presentation instead of being repulsed by many of us who are extremely used to how certain functions work and expect consistency (and usually just want to see the specs, not a sales pitch).

It's not just about how I expect the web to work, I'm looking at Google's website on Google's phone in Google's web browser and it's _janky_. It's just bad. I as a software developer feel confused and disoriented, how is Grandma supposed to read this?

Plus it slows down my browser to a crawl.

The best part is my fans revving up to max and getting noisy as heck.

The page is unusable on an iPad (5th gen) due to the scrolling feature. I have a general aversion to products with sales channels failures, since my heuristic is that if you can’t get your sales right then support or product is even worse.

Using that heuristic with the current sales page for the iPad Pro, don't consider upgrading.

It was smooth as butter on my iPhone 11, FWIW.

Not in battery saver mode it isn't.

This, I dont mind the animation, as long as it is silky smooth, 60Fps with little CPU usage, i.e it wouldn't warm up my iPad or iPhone or my MacBook Air.

I have yet to see any web page scrolling animation that is smooth doesn't cause Jank. And it is very bad experience. I remember the Trash Can Mac Pro website had that website design , and I cant imagine any Pro actually like that. ( And the current AirPod website as well )

These low frame rate animation actually cause me headache and making me throw up.

They looked at Apple's product pages, couldn't figure out how they work and why they are made to work like that, and piled all up on their own pages.

On a more general note, I totally agree with you: scroll hijacking is a real issue and very very few people actually take care to implement it correctly. The New Yorker is one of the few who usually get it right in their interactive stories.

Both sucks.

The performance is simply terrible for me. Is there something wrong with my setup (32 core Sandy Bridge, Linux, Firefox), or do companies simply not test this stuff on desktops?

It works ok on 2018 Macbook Pro (2,3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5), MacOS, Firefox.

It crashes my Firefox Tab. I've seen similar crashes from Google store pages previously.

I do like these presentational sites when done well. [0]

So not this one.

[0] https://www.apple.com/ipad-air/

Huh, I don’t know what’s up with that page, but it works horribly on my recent iPhone. Like, not just that it’s conceptually bad, but the text flickers, images appear for a second and then disappear, and it’s not smooth at all. Maybe it works better on Chrome on a desktop, but you’d think the Apple would get their site to work well on their own devices!

IMO, they both are just horrible. My Mac fan starts buzzing soon after I open any of them, as a bonus to the shitty UX. But yes, Apple one is done much better.

It's especially galling when the first thing you stutter to says "Smooth, fast performance. More RAM lets you move from task to task, super fast." :)

The effect reminds of a medieval music box, or the manual crankshaft of an antique car. Turn scroll wheel to see more. Really, technology?

Not only that. Scrollbar animations are almost always slow, laggy unless you happen to own top performance computer. It also robs me of knowing where am I in site or even animation frame. Is it over yet? Or do I just need to scroll a bit more to reveal whole intended picture?

I tried to browse it and it's barely usable on Firefox on my old computer.

Also you can't basically skim through the page / infos as everything is oversized and all over the place.

Eventually I closed the page without knowing much about the phone (I noticed the lack of jack plug though).

How does their javascript make the back gesture on my Chromebook not work? Not a fan of that.

It actually detects your scroll speed (on mobile anyway) and skips certain animations if you’re scrolling fast enough. Still feels weird though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com