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Comment by zaidf | Hacker News Reader

Couple more super annoying mobile UI patterns that should die:

1. Banner ads in footer that blink every time you scroll the page. The blinking makes me go nuts when reading a longer article. It gets my attention alright but I sure don't associate that brand positively in my mind.

2. Not being able to select text on an iPhone in safari. I really dont get this. Websites shoot themselves in the foot because often I want to share the article and quote a sentence or two. I don't because I can't select the text!

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To select text in Mobile Safari you have to tap and hold, not double tap. WebKit views are only place in iOS where this is inconsistent.

I suspect it is this way because double tap was reserved for zoom-to-fit in iPhone OS 1.0, and now we're stuck with it being that way.

I think it has more to do with apps which have some touch-tracking in place, perhaps for creating a heat map. Try copying text from a twitter post on the mobile web app or Facebook mobile web app..

I was referring to sites that find a way to disable tap and hold text selection, intentionally or not.

Interesting. I haven't encountered this problem.

I joined a team working on a single page app that disabled text selection (via CSS user-select:none) to give it more of an "app" feel. While I understood disabling text selection on certain things, the "disable everything" approach drove me nuts.

When we had a redesign of our app, I decided that was one rule that could be left out (and only applied where needed).

It gets my attention alright but I sure don't associate that brand positively in my mind.

This has always confounded me about advertising. Intrusive ads piss everybody off. Why does it happen so much?

Sponsorships for example are a good way to advertise your brand because you can sponsor things like hackathons and marathons that people see as healthy, happy events. Associate yourself with that. Shoving your logo in my face when I'm concentrating on something else is going to make me resent you. I even used to keep a .txt file of companies I'm avoiding because they annoyed me with their advertising.

Two factors come to mind:

1) It's easier to measure the increase in ad revenue than the decrease in brand value. Somebody tries out the shitty ads, sees income increase, and says, "Hey, free money!" Later on, execs are mystified about viewership declines.

2) The intrusive ads don't piss everybody off, just a sensitive fraction. They don't care if you resent them as long as enough yahoos keep watching and clicking.

Those are great points. You're right.

3) People greatly overestimate their own ability to remember and subsequently modify their behavior so as to punish the offending advertiser in a way that matters.

I experience a lot of text selection issues, with similar effects on forms. I tried to login to HN on Chrome for Android on my phone the other day. Every single (not double or held) tap on the username field would select the field, zoom in and deselect the field. Incredibly frustrating given it's the simplest HTML possible, so really it's Chrome's fault. No issues on larger screens though.

Pretty much any toolbar or banner that persists, while I'm scrolling, bugs me. It's especially annoying when I zoom in on a paragraph and a persistent, full size, toolbar looms over content.

The verge mobile site is a victim of 1. However they let you close the ad completely while you're on the page.

I'd like to add another item to your list, tap to zoom. Why some webdevs disable this feature? If I can't tap to zoom I usually do one of these two things: open the reader or leave.

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