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Comment by CGamesPlay | Hacker News Reader

I've seen two links to this domain in as many days and I absolutely can't stand the developer's treatment of links. I can't actually click on them, because just hovering them opens them in some ephemeral pseudo-popup, and I can't read the main article, because scrolling will invariably hover over some link which will then open that popup and cover up the article I was reading.

It's absurd to me that this apparently independent blogger's website is the best argument I've ever seen for "JavaScript should be disabled by default."

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Like on Wikipedia, which we borrowed the design from, popups can be controlled & disabled with the 'gear' icon.

I'm not sure what you mean by "can't actually click on them". Popups are positioned away from the link and do not cover up the original link, which can be clicked on like normal. (You can also click on the obvious thing in the popup, the title, which is a hyperlink to the original.)

The scroll thing is definitely bad, but fixing it is a little difficult. (GreaterWrong solves it by a hybrid of 2 listeners which tries to guess if you are mousing or scrolling instead of just on-hover.) I don't know if/when that will be fixed. In the mean time, I'm boosting the timeout since more than one person has complained about popups being too quick.

> Popups are positioned away from the link and do not cover up the original link, which can be clicked on like normal. (You can also click on the obvious thing in the popup, the title, which is a hyperlink to the original.)

This was absolutely not the case, at least on my viewport size. FWIW, I also didn't realize about clicking on "the obvious thing in the popup", possibly because this is never a thing that you click on in websites.

> The scroll thing is definitely bad, but fixing it is a little difficult.

What's the motivation for this being a hover effect? Seems like clicking on the link to open it is a pretty well-tested paradigm.

[append]

One big difference between what I saw on your site and Wikipedia is that Wikipedia's are only previews and (AFAICT) feature no internal interactions.

I actually like it, I just wish it wasn't so fast. The delay is less than a second when really it ought to be more like a a second and a half.

you can disable those pop-ups.

make one of them appear and click on the gear icon top right.

You conveyed exactly what i wanted to say. I don't remember reaching for 'Disable JavaScript' this fast for a website.

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