Hacker News Reader

Comment by vortico | Hacker News Reader

Sticky headers make me feel claustrophobic, I don't know why. Regardless of my screen height (it could be a 30" monitor), it feels like something is "stuck" to my browser that wasn't before and makes me feel anxious.

Even without that feeling, sticky headers kill the feeling that I'm moving through a viewport of a webpage. It makes your website look like it's not of the "webpage" medium that I've been familiar with for 20 years. Humans have a very good eye for relative movement. The visual processing part of your brain considers movement much more contrasting than color. So a fixed header when you're scrolling at 1cm/second is visually equivalent to a big bar moving upward at 1cm/second while you're trying to read an article. It's hard not to pay attention to it. But navbars don't contain content, so they shouldn't steal attention from the page content.

View on HN

Exactly. When I'm using an application called a browser to view a document on the web, I don't want the document to try to become part of the chrome: that breaks the "web page" metaphor. There is a very small subset of websites, such as Figma, that feel more like independent applications than web pages, and for those I get more annoyed by the presence of the browser chrome, for basically the same reason.

What's worse, almost no sticky header has any useful items in it. Take StackOverflow as an example. It has a link to the homepage and a searchbar, in spite of the fact that many frequent StackOverflow users have never visited the homepage and never used the built-in search. The top of the screen is the most valuable part, because my head is usually above the screen, so it's more comfortable for my eyes to rest around the top of the viewport. So if you put something there, it had better be important.

You should hit f11 if you're working in an app and are upset with the browser bar. Go full screen or go home.

Sticky headers just become part of the window to me. Like everything, some are better than others. Some are horrendous with flashing video/banners/etc. Some are useful so that the site navigation is always available regardless of page length. I personally hate having to scroll back to the top just to jump to the next section. This website is too hot, this one is too cold, this one is almost just right. Can't please 100% of the users, ever.

I think the only time sticky headers are ever acceptable is when you need to regularly refer back to them. Long tables without sticky headers are the worst

Or use recfile syntax instead of a table.

Columns can be easily collapsed or hid; wasting vertical space is a worse solution than wasting horizontal space

Also tables align nicely in a grid, recfiles do not

One might be bigger than the other, but in absolute terms both are just big.

In a big grid you can't make sense of the cells anyway, so that alignment has no function beyond being just an alignment.

Unless you browse the internet in a frameless full screen window, there are a lot of other elements stuck at the top of it (or at the bottom)

It might be you're overreacting to something it's not really a big deal in general

Reply on news.ycombinator.com