Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you

Another common problem with overlayed top bars is that when following fragment links within a page, the browser scrolls the page such that the target anchor is at the top of the window, which then means it’s hidden by the top bar. For example, when jumping to a subsection, the subsection title (and the first lines of the following paragraph text) will often be obscured by the top bar.

Funnily enough for years I would say the general consensus on HN was that it was a thoughtful alternative to having to scroll back to the top, esp back when it was a relatively new gimmick on mobile.

I remember arguing about it on HN back when I was in uni.

The ACM's site has a bar like that, though it's thin enough that the issue is with the animations rather than the size: it expands then immediately collapses after even a pixel's worth of scrolling, so it's basically impossible to get at with the "hide distracting elements" picker.

Now you mention it, I hate hate hate scroll inertia.

I've yet to encounter a "dick bar" that doesn't jerk the page around when it collapses. Not smooth at all. I'm surprised that it hasn't been solved in 10 years.

I use this handy bookmarklet to kill sticky headers::

https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky

The bar screws up printing usually.

Any examples? Searching for "flapping bar" didn't yield anything.

> Hyperlinks that do on-hover gimmicks like load previews or charts.

I haven't seen one that shows charts, but I gotta admit, I miss the hover preview when not reading wikipedia.

I really appreciate hyperlinks that serve as citations, like “here’s some prior art to back up what I’m saying,” or that explain some joke, reference, jargon, etc. that the reader might not be familiar with, but unfortunately a lot of sites don’t use them that way.

Another: "Related" interstitial elements scattered within an article.

Fucking NPR now has ~2--6 "Related" links between paragraphs of a story. I frequently read the site via w3m, and yes, will load the rendered buffer in vim (<esc>-e) to delete those when reading an article.

I don't know if it's oversensitisation or progressive cognitive decline, but even quite modest distracting cruft is increasingly intolerable.

If you truly have related stories, pile them at the end of the article, and put in some goddamned microcontent (title, description, publication date) for the article.

As I've mentioned previously, my "cnn-sanify" script which strips story links and headlines from CNN's own "lite" page, and restructures those into section-organised, time-sorted presentation. Mostly for reading from the shell, though I can dump the rendered file locally and read it in a GUI browser as well.

See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535359>

My biggest disappointment: CNN's article selection is pretty poor. I'd recently checked against 719 stories collected since ~18 December 2024, and of the 111 "US" stories, 54% are relatively mundane crime. Substantive stories are the exception.

(The sense that few of the headlines really were significant was a large part of why I'd written the organisation script in the first place.)

Case in point: in the Tom's Hardware article about AMD's Strix Halo (1), there's this sentence:

> AMD says this delivers groundbreaking capabilities for thin-and-light laptops and mini workstations, particularly in AI workloads. The company also shared plenty of gaming and content creation _benchmarks_. (emphasis mine)

I clicked on "benchmarks", expecting to see some, well, benchmarks for the new CPU, hoping to see some games like Cyberpunk that I might want to play. But no, it links to /tag/benchmark.

1: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amds-beastly...

> Text littered with hyperlinks on every sentence.

This is the biggest hassle associated with reading articles online. I'm never going to click on those links because:

- the linked anchor text says nothing about the website it's linking to - the link shows a 404 (common with articles 2+ years old) - the link is probably paywalled

Very annoying that article writing guidelines are unchanges from the 2000s where linkrot and paywalls were almost unheard of.

Some old-enough browsers don't support SSL. At all.

Also, something I often see non-technical people fall victim to is that if your clock is off, the entirety of the secure web is inaccessible to you. Why should a blog (as opposed to say online banking) break for this reason?

When you force TLS/HTTPS, you are committing both yourself (server) and the reader (client) to a perpetual treadmill of upgrades (a.k.a. churn). This isn't a value judgement, it is a fact; it is a positive statement, not a normative statement. Roughly speaking, the server and client softwares need to be within say, 5 years of each other, maybe 10 years at maximum - or else they are not compatible.

For both sides, you need to continually agree on root certificates (think of how the ISRG had to gradually introduce itself to the world - first through cross-signing, then as a root), protocol versions (e.g. TLSv1.3), and cipher suites.

For the server operator specifically, you need to find a certificate authority that works for you and then continually issue new certificates before the old one expires. You might need to deal with ordering a revocation in rare cases.

I can think of a few reasons for supporting unsecured HTTP: People using old browsers on old computers/phones (say Android 4 from 10 years ago), extremely outdated computers that might be controlling industrial equipment with long upgrade cycles, simple HTTP implementations for hobbyists and people looking to reimplement systems from scratch.

I haven't formed a strong opinion on whether HTTPS-only is the way to go or dual HTTP/HTTPS is an acceptable practice, so I don't really make recommendations on what other people should do.

For my own work, I use HTTPS only because exposing my services to needless vulnerabilities is dumb. But I understand if other people have other considerations and weightings.

Why should web browsers treat http like a bug? Many sites don’t need https.

It can have severe performance implications in some areas with very bad internet bandwidth. Also it makes instantiating a global cache more difficult. See: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2018/08/07/securing-sites... Another POV: https://brr.fyi/posts/engineering-for-slow-internet And https://danluu.com/web-bloat/ also has some minor numbers

I think you missed the "Use it if you want" part.

Both Chrome and Firefox will get you to the HTTPS website even though the link starts with "http://", and it works, what more do you want?

You have to type "http://" explicitly, or use something that is not a typical browser to get the unencrypted HTTP version. And if that's what you are doing, that's probably what you want. There are plenty of reasons why, some you may not agree with, but the important part that the website doesn't try to force you.

That's the entire point of this article, users and their browsers know what they are doing, just give then what they ask for, no more, no less.

I also have a personal opinion that SSL/TLS played a significant part in "what's wrong with the internet today". Essentially, it is the cornerstone of the commercial web, and the commercial web, as much as we love to criticize it, brought a lot of great things. But also a few not so great ones, and for a non-commercial website like this one, I think having the option of accessing it the old (unencrypted) way is a nice thing.

That's the only one I had an issue with as well.

I understand the thinking, backwards compatibility of course, and why encrypt something that is already freely available? But this means I can setup a public wifi that hijacks the website and displays whatever I want instead.

TLS is about securing your identity online.

I think with AI forgeries we will move more into each person online having a secure identity. Starting with well know personas and content creators.

It's fine on a simple site. But lack of SSL/TLS also effectively disables http2 which is a performance hit, not just a security concern.

My first impulse is to scream obscenities at you because I've seen this argument so many times repeated that I tend just keep quiet.. I don't think you can't understand, but I think you refuse to.

You're basically saying "oh, _YOUR_ usecase is wrong, so let's take this away from everybody because it's dangerous sometimes"

But yeah, I have many machines which would work just fine online except they can't talk to the servers anymore due to the newer algorithms being unavailable for the latest versions of their browsers (which DO support img tags, gifs and even pngs)

This.

My favorite experience was trying to file taxes on Linux in Germany.

Turns out the backend on ELSTER had written code that if Chrome and Linux then store to test account. It wasn't possible to file taxes on Linux for over 6 months until they fixed it when they went online as a mandatory state-funded web service. I can't even comprehend who writes code like that.

Took me also a very long while to explain to the BKA that I did not try to hack them, and that they are just very incompetent people working at DATEV.

It's annoying that every time "they" come up with a new antipattern, "we" have to add yet another extension to the list of mandatory things for each browser. And it also promotes browser monopoly because extensions get ported slowly to non-mainstream browsers.

It would be better to have a single extension like uBlock origin to handle the browser compatibility, and then release the countermeasures through that. In fact, ublock already has "Annoyances" lists for things like cookie banners, but I don't think it includes the dick bar unfortunately.

Incidentally, these bars are always on sites where the navbar takes 10% vertical space, cookie banner (full width of course) takes another 30% at the bottom, their text is overspaced and oversized, the left/right margins are huge so the text is like 50% of the width... Don't these people ever look at their own site? With many of these, I'm so confused how anyone could look at it and say it's good to go.

Nice. This may be my pet peeve on the modern internet. Nearly EVERY site has a dick bar, and the reason I care is it breaks scrolling with spacebar, which is THE most comfortable way to read long content, it scrolls you a screen at a time. But a dickbar obscures the first 1 to…10? lines of the content, so you have to scroll back up. The only thing worse than the dickbar is the dickbar that appears and disappears depending on last direction scrolled, so that each move of the scrolling mechanism changes the viewport size. A pox on them all.

I just toggle reader mode. Gets rid of this and everything else annoying. For sites where that doesn't work, I zap the bar in uBO.

I am usually the first old man to yell at any cloud, and I was overjoyed when someone invented the word "enshittening" for me to describe how the internet has gotten, but it surprised me a bit that people found that one annoying. I can see the problem of it sticking the top of the page with a logo (which is basically an ad and I hate those), but they usually have a menu there, so I always thought of them a bit like the toolbar at the top of an application window in a native desktop application. FWIW when I've built those, I've always de-emphasized the branding and focused on making the menus obvious and accessible.

I'm happy to learn something new about other people's preferences, though. If people prefer scrolling to the top, so be it!

EDIT: It occurs to me that this could be a preference setting. A few of the websites that have let me have my way, I've started generating CSS from a Django template and adding configuration options to let users set variables like colors--with really positive feedback from disabled users. At a fundamental level, I think the solution to accessibility is often configurability, because people with different disabilities often need different, mutually incompatible accommodations.

You can disable this as a browser setting in some browsers (like Chrome). It was driving me nuts until I figured out I could just flip a global flag for it.

Most people don't remember, and some have never experienced, the Internet before it became a money grab.

I think a lot of people outside of HN would prefer that Internet way more than what we have now.

This actually appeals to everyone. There are words and people can read them. It literally just works. With zero friction. This is peak engineering. It's how the web is supposed to work. It is objectively better. For everyone. Everyone except advertisers.

The only problem to be solved here is the fact advertisers are the ones paying the people who make web pages. They're the ones distorting the web into engagement maximizing content consumption platforms like television.

To me, it seems like basically everything on this page is both better for reader and better for writer. Which ones are not, in your opinion?

I mostly agree with this. Commercial websites probably should track engagement and try to increase it. They should probably use secure http. They probably should not care about supporting browsers without JS. If they need sign in then signing in with Google is useful. There's no harm in having buttons to share on social media if that will help you commercially.

Where I think the post hits on something real is the horrible UI patterns. Those floating bars, weird scroll windows, moving elements that follow you around the site. I don't believe these have been AB tested and shown to increase engagement. Those things are going to lose you customers. I genuinely don't understand why people do this.

The author isn't trying to profit from the reader's attention; it's just a personal blog. An ad-based business would. Neither is right or wrong, but the latter is distinctly annoying.

> appeals to HN and nobody else

Your argument is that writers do this because of "economics", but to the detriment of readers. I don't see how this extends only to HN readers. It applies to all readers in general.

Let's be real. If you have a website were you are trying to sell something to your page visitors (not ad clicks or referral links), then each of these annoyances and hurdles increase the risk that a potential customer backs out of it.

If you give great customer service, you get great customers – and they don't mind paying a premium.

If you're coercing customers, then you get bad customers – and they are much more likely to give you trouble later.

Most business owners are your run of the mill dimwits, because we live in a global feudal economic system – and owning a business doesn't mean you are great at sales or have any special knowledge in your business domain. It usually just means you got an inheritance or that you have the social standing to be granted a loan.

Substack's UI is fairly minimal and does not appear to have many anti-patterns. My only complaint is that it is not easy to see just the people I am subscribed to.

The logic here is that it's you who come to visit, not them. But the next issue is that everyone agrees it's not normal for a private service either, even if it's free, and it should be disallowed. But laws don't work like that. We simply have no law systems that could manage that, nowhere on this planet.

Imagine if people understood consent the way the tech industry does.

> Sometimes with a cart full of items not yet paid for.

And then a week later you'll get an email "Did you forget to buy all those products we're sure you want?..."

Supposedly it’s an SEO thing. The theory is that Google is biased towards novelty and so penalises older articles (although I’m not sure how removing the date would help because surely Google would still know how long the article has been online for.)

I have no idea how true that is but I remember hearing SEO folks talk about it a few years back.

Back in the day it used to be the way to do it. Web servers would serve example.com/foo/index.html when visiting example.com/foo/ and it was the easy way of not having example.com/foo.html as your URL.

Later on Web servers made it easier to load foo.html for example.com/foo, but that wasn't always the case.

It's been a couple of decades since I had to do it, but at least that's my memory on why I've been doing this since forever (including on newer websites, which is admittedly a mistake).

I've got nothing against it. Just parse it as "the default file for that path" since one isn't specified. Just like you expect that for the main page e.g. "https://news.ycombinator.com/" or "https://google.com/" except as a subdirectory.

I like it as a clear visual indication of where the URL ends. And a page often consists of more than just one file (images etc.) (the HTML portion of the page is just an implicit index.html in the directory), so it does make some sense.

> I’ve had to be pretty firm in the past with marketing teams that want to embark on a rebrand, and say however the design looks, it can’t include modal windows or animated carousels. And I think people think you’re weird when you say that.

Some small businesses create websites for branding only, and get their business exclusively offline. They just want to have a simple, static site to say "we exist, and we are professionals", so they are fine with the latest in web design.

You can make a profitable text-only website, e.g. Craigslist.

But not everything on the web should be for profit.

Look up any typographic manual and you'll learn that you can't make lines of text too wide or else people will have trouble reading them. Example - https://practicaltypography.com/line-length.html .

This is also related to why professional newspapers and magazines lay out text in relatively narrow columns, because they are easy to scan just top-down while hardly moving your eyes left-right.

I do think that vertical phones are too narrow for conveying decent text, but you also can't have completely unbounded page widths because people do run browsers maximized on desktop 4K screens.

My iOS Safari has it. I turned it on for the NYT, because I wanted a dark theme and then turned it off again because I realized that I like what they do with their pages (still have an ad blocker turned on though, because subscribers still see tons of ads).

Brave has this.

brave://settings/?search=Speedreader

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045031392-Wha...

I used to agree with you, but a pure text web looks like Gemini, which I abandoned after a few days of getting lost in endless identical looking blogs.

There is no reason that websites shouldn't have room for some creative expression. For as long as writing has existed, images, fonts, spacing, embellishment, borders, and generally every imaginable axis has been used as additional expression, beyond the literal meaning of the text.

The body width is necessary because web browsers have long since abandoned any pretense of developing html for the average joe. It is normal to use web browsers maximized, so without limiting the body width the text is ridiculously long and uncomfortable to read.

I think this is beyond being nitpicky.

JS progress bars also generally show you your progress through the main-content div or whatever, so even if they have a particularly egregious footer (I've seen footers that are over 1000px tall, with embedded youtube videos), the progress through the actual content is still somewhat faithfully reported.

Better would be to ditch the absurd footer, but still.

Android Chrome at least has a scrollbar visible as you scroll

Legitimately curious, what interesting websites are usable without CSS?

> As I browsed HN at home, I found that links to her website would not load

Thanks for mentioning this, because I was having the same issue and I was surprised no one was mentioning that the site was (appeared to be) down. Switching to using a VPN made the post available to me.

> use the HTTPS version

It's probably reasonable to use HSTS to force https-aware browsers to upgrade and avoid injection of all the things she hates. Dumb browsers like `netcat` are not harmed by this at all. But even then ... why aren't you using `curl` or something?

Not exactly this but https://search.marginalia.nu/ will probably return sites that match these criteria

Kagi Small Web (the index is open source) comes to my mind, even though it doesn't specifically focus on UI annoyances.

https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

Ah, but that's just the stylistic churn. There's also monetization, illustrated by this dark and terrifying tale, best-viewed in a desktop browser for proper impact:

https://modem.io/blog/blog-monetization/

I use this bookmarklet to disable all CSS styling:

    javascript:(function(){var styles=document.querySelectorAll('style,link[rel="stylesheet"]');styles.forEach(function(style){style.disabled=true;});document.body.querySelectorAll('*').forEach(function(el){el.style.cssText='';});})();

Is there a way to do anything in chrome now? It became your personal google port and will soon disable any content-modification for the sake of your adsecurity and prinvadcy.

Progress bars are annoying because that’s what scroll bars are for, and because horizontal progress bars (a) have the wrong orientation and (b) look like a loading/download indicator.

<https://rachelbythebay.com/w/feed/>

(Under the RSS icon.)

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/12/10/feed/

Perhaps you should either file a bug with NetNewsWire, or debug NetNewsWire and submit a PR so it works with her blog.

This particular button is quite visible on the webpage

`layout.testing.overlay-scrollbars.always-visible` in `about:config` is your friend.

I genuinely can't tell if this is sarcasm but yeah Kagi aims to do that

> Now about SSL/TLS, we programmers are often forced to do this because there are many users who, when faced with the absence of the padlock on the page, don't even bother to continue for fear of having their data stolen.

I got to experience this last week: some family member uses the gmail app to consult hotmail emails. Suddenly the app started asking to reenter login information: the message looked like a fishing mail. When you clicked on it it popped what looked like the outlook openID login page but without any address bar shown. Is it the app? Some webpage? Looks like fishing.

Perfect job from the UI team: either you don't update your credential because it really looks like a fishing attempt or you get trained to use those credentials in random apps / website.