Tell HN: In my entire life, I have never enjoyed a scrolljacking website | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: In my entire life, I have never enjoyed a scrolljacking website

44 pointsswidi10 comments

Not once.

I don't care how hard you worked on it, I don't care how many web technologies you abused to get it working, I don't care how many hits or views or conversions or whatchamacallits it got for you.

If I visit your website and I see a scrolljacking, window-breaking, bandwidth hogging accessibility nightmare, I'm either going to force it to open in Safari Reader or leave entirely.

No content is worth this crap.

View on HN

Or how about hijacking the Ctrl-F so we get your rinkydink search tool rather than the browser's built in search.

And now you've got me curious; who does want this? Is it just designers who really want a very specific experience, down to the way things move onto the screen?

My guess is that it originates with designers who build these web pages as basically Keynote / PowerPoint presentations.

It’s shown to management, everybody oohs and aahs at the clever transitions between slides… And then the developer is stuck trying to replicate that “unique experience” with the designer breathing down their neck.

Yea I don’t quite get it. You immediately annoy/alienate users

Yep, I worked as a front-end dev since forever and I can confirm that I've been routinely asked by designers and other product people to

    - Change how scrolling works, incl. arbitrary scrolling angles and non-linear scrolling speed
    - Change how the fonts (and SVGs) are rasterized by the browser
    - Disable browser features, such as zoom and back button
    - Take over the browser's UI in other disgusting ways

...I work as a backend dev now, it's a happy place where people genuinely care that the SQL query runs fast, but nobody ever asked in which font it renders in Firefox on macOS.

I just discovered the “hide” button on HN.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2t1vfur07xE&pp=ygUMd2hvb29vIGN...

What does that have to do with anything?

When you search “scrolljacking” on HN, all of the posts are from 6-9 years ago. Most are 8-9 years old.

Is OP really still talking about scrolljacking with so much vehement in 2023?

yawn

Tbh, I haven’t even seen a site that scrolljacks in years. I definitely haven’t cared in years.

Also, this is what the HN guidelines say about this:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

I continue to encounter them, and at times try to disable that dainbramage by: messing with dev tools (but some sites can be very tricky about re-applying JS), disabling Javascript (but some then load little or none of the content, or trying three to five browser extensions that claim to prevent this (but usually fail).

My goto response is: mentally blacklist the site and its products/services. They don't seem to notice, though. (-;

Regarding "tangential annoyances": if the article's topic is "foo", and somebody complains about the article using Geneva instead of Helvetica, I'd call that tangential; but if the topic is "too many sites are doing annoying thing 'baz'!", then I'd not call than tangential.

Define "jacking"

What site really prompted this Tell HN rant?

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