OVERLAYS
Sorry for shouting, but they are very annoying.
NO I DO NOT WANT TO SIGN UP FOR YOUR NEWSLETTER, BLOGGER WITH A RECIPE I NO LONGER WANT
Agreed. So many websites want you to sign up for their newsletter before you've even read the first line of text.
Even they aren't as bad as the sites that ask for feedback as soon as they open >.<
Also: THIS SITE IS BETTER IN THE APP! Every time you open the site.
If I wanted to use the app, I'd have it installed by now.
Those were popup windows years ago and every browser started blocking them and does to this day. I wish they would start blocking overlays too.
Agreed. Anything that pops up in front of the content I want to see, can fuck off!
I fucking hate this.
When they ask you about cookies and you can "accept all" in one click, but if you want to reject all that aren't strictly necessary you have to navigate to a different page
Oh man, especially those that have like 100 toggle switches you have to manually switch. I hate those so much.
Yeah, this should be illegal. I predict California and/or the EU will get rid of it soonish (within the next 10 years maybe? not the most experienced forecaster).
It is IIRC. In the eu I think its mandatory that declining cookies is as easy as accepting.
Protip: Use a VPN and connect to an EU country. You'll see more of the single "Reject All" buttons.
Which is better but still sucks. The whole thing is flawed from the ground up: In order to remember you opted out of cookies, it is necessary to store a cookie in your browser. Cookies should be op-in but I think it's obvious this is not gonna happen
Pretty sure a cookie like that would fall under strictly necessary, so you're still allowed to save it without consent.
Chat boxes that popup so that a bot can "help" you find products
Bonus points if it plays audio
Ok god yes, kill it with fire. Any pop-ups that open on the home page of a website actually. Are you trying to get me to immediately leave your site??
For me it's Google search's tab order. They always switch up the tabs for web, images, videos, etc. depending on what you search for. It makes the experience very unpredictable and annoying.
Recently they've also started putting related searches next to the tabs 🤦
This is so frustrating, and another reason I'm going to try to stop using Google.
On mobile browser: the ad that "loads" under your finger when you tap on something.
Without counting user-hostile design: automatically playing any sort of sound as soon as you enter the website. Specially radio. Thankfully at least Firefox doesn't allow this crap any more,
Oh my god I hate twitch for autoplaying some random stream I don't want to watch on the front page
Anti adblockers, specially when the page is riddled with porn ads
Most of them can be bypassed with uBlock Origin, and if they can't then I treat that site as if it doesn't exist
Not in any special order
sideways scrolling
Also: scroll-jacking.
I decide how many lines I want to scroll with the wheel and I also intentionally disabled "smooth scrolling". No need to change that, thank you, stupid website!
The ones names already are worst than this one but it needs to be here
When the site hijacks the scroll to play some animation as you scroll down the page
This "mobile first" thing. No, I don't want 20px fonts for text or absurdly large buttons to click on with my mouse cursor.
And scrolling up and down constantly cause there's not enough screenspace to show all the information (because 90% of the screenspace is empty or used for enourmous padding)
Mobile web sites that disable pinch to zoom. I've always enabled the setting in Firefox to allow it on all sites, but I still occasionally find one that somehow manages to override my preference.
Dear devs: There is no reason to ever disable it. It's hostile to all users, and especially those with impaired vision.
As a developer: trust me, we don't want these features either. It's project managers and clients who force us to do such things.
Same with links that open in new tabs. Except on pages with inputs that you can fill in, I rarely see any justification for those.
As a user, if I want a page to open in a new tab, I press the middle mouse button. If I press the left mouse button, I don't want a new tab.
Autoplay while scrolling.
Those horrible news sites where they show these ads for all kinds of garbage as you try to go back to the previous page you were on.
When a website changes the scrolling to be smooth and slow. Like I don't want my scrolling to accelerate really slowly for ages and then decelerate for the same amount of time, I want my scrolling to be quick and responsive.
Also when websites change scrolling to be anything other than scrolling, like the iMac 24-inch Website when the scrolling animates the screen and stand instead of just scrolling.
Designing an absolutely hostile mobile experience intentionally then displaying a pop up on how much better the experience in their app is (it isn't) - 99% of apps could be a webpage or a PWA.
Another mobile website annoyance of mine is where common features aren't present from the desktop version, forcing me to switch to desktop view and try to navigate on a small screen or making me boot up my PC just to perform the simplest task.
"would you like to receive notifications in your browser from this site?"
No. No I would not.
Algoritmes that make sure u can't find a post again when u mis click or something. Facebook/Instagram drive me nuts because of this.
Mousing over a UI element causes it to expand and cover neighboring UI elements.
Floating menu bars that scroll with the page.
Overriding the browser's built in keyboard combos and context menus.
"Hero" header images.
Requiring Javascript to render static text.
Styling the scrollbar.
Modal dialogs of any kind.
Breaking the "Back" button.
This modern one-page website style, where when you click on a Link in the menu it just scrolls you down to that part.
I mean it's ok for Wikipedia where you basically have a document, but I hate it for multimedia or company stuff.
Most of the time it's coupled with these animation instead of actually scrolling shit.
That popup asking about cookies because they cause cancer in California or whatever. It should auto decline cookies and have a button at the bottom to manually sign over your first born child if you choose to do so.
Unskippable tutorials.
When it has an overlay video that fills up to half the screen even if you scroll. And the X button is not even being shown.
When you’re on a shopping site and a little pop up appears over the picture of the item telling you how many people have bought it in the last day and how many have viewed it. I don’t care!! Just let me see the actual item!
I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers are made up. Just dark patterns to make it seem like the product is hot.
Though I've found it kinda interesting when websites show little messages like "Someone from country just bought item!".
Being 100x the size and 'modern feel' with 1x the content than we used to have
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