Stop Eating My Pixels | Hacker News Reader

Stop Eating My Pixels

36 pointsmarknadal6 comments

Early on, it was just the cool design kids who would use fixed CSS positioning to stick some element to the viewport as you scrolled.

But then companies started picking up the trend and started attaching help buttons, review links, and chat support.

Then the widgets exploded, snap-on sharing options, mini status update bars...

Apparently, then, every big name company started feeling a little lackluster. News sites like TechCrunch jumped onboard, Facebook joined the party, and now even Gmail is spiff'n the new look.

No! This is my screen space! It is precious and valuable for vertical scrolling, my laptop is only 768 pixels tall, my netbook is only 600 pixels tall. I don't want your stupid fixed banner, especially when it is 80%+ deadspace of useless pixels.

I need these pixels to view what I want to look at! Stop the trend. Stop the genocide of the pixels.

If there were a browser extension to block all fixed elements from displaying, I would install it.

ADDED. Here is a first draft of some text for the Kickstarter project: "The extension would modify the Google Chrome browser so that no fixed-position CSS elements would display. However, the extension must not prevent the display of any elements that would have been displayed by an unmodified copy Firefox 2.0 with plugins (Flash, Sliverlight, etc) disabled."

ADDED. There are some sign-up forms, e.g., on Reddit that would probably be rendered unreachable by this browser extension. So maybe it needs a whitelist.

Easy: Adblock Plus and Adblock Select Element Hiding Helper

Point, click, block, done...

You could maybe use greasemonkey to remove the fixed position.

Not to mention that that fixed elements are just-plain broken in the Android browser. They don't attach to the edges of the viewport (which would be bad for the reasons you outlined) — they simply sit in whatever position they are given when the page first renders (which is also bad because it often covers content you'd like to see, or interact with).

Used to be like that on iOS. On iOS5 they attach to the viewport but zoom "normally", destroying most sites where they're used.

http://www.ghostery.com helps fight third-party JS

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