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Comment by pera | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why these bars are being used everywhere, personally I find them annoying. Scrolling up takes like half a second...

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The sole reason is branding. Websites don't want you just reading content; they want you reading content on their site. The most obvious way to remind you that you're reading it on their site, and thus convince you to come back, is a fixed header bar.

Funny thing that they make a site that looks exactly the same as every other site, and then they discover that they have a branding problem.

I never have any problem remembering that I'm readding HN.

Branding problem, or a content problem?

I suppose part of what lead to this was browser vendors pretty much eliminating the traditional title bar (by the time you have a dozen tabs open there's room for maybe 7 letters and a 16x16 icon per tab), so websites have had to start supplementing with their own title bars to help users figure out what site they're on.

And the more branding a site uses, the faster I reach for the "Read Now" Readability bookmark.

I realize I'm likely a very small portion of the demographic, by my prior two decades' experience with Web Annoyances tells me that my own sentiments aren't much different from those of the typical Web user, it's just that I'm aware of, and make use of, tools to fix many of the problems.

This really depends on the device. iOS devices with their fancy inertial stuff scrolling is very pleasant but if you're using entry level cheap devices, scrolling is not as easy or pleasant. Specially with the new trend of infinite scrolling sites where your scroll down for days...

Is there a device where tapping the top of the screen doesn't immediately scroll to the top?

If anything, these bars are worse on devices that have poor scrolling behavior, as I've found they tend to interfere with scrolling.

Yes, most Android devices don't have that feature as far as I know. And it is possibly a bad time to introduce it, because by now users may have already learned that tapping the status bar (on recent Android versions at least) shows the time and date in bigger fonts, as if starting to open the notifications screen.

Chrome on Android doesn't.

Infinte scroll works fine on deskop, but is not very useful on mobile devices with a spotty connection.

Though, personally I would like pagination (like Google) back for Facebook, Flickr and also Google Images - scrolling down a few "pages" is just buggy on those sites, and click on the wrong link and you have to go back and scroll all the way down!

> I don't get why these bars are being used everywhere

I Blame it on the design patterns of (Twitter) Bootstrap. A lot of sites are put together with it. Although the default nav-bar is not bolted to the top it is easy to read how to do that in the docs and implement it because it seems like a good idea at the time. Others, not using Bootstrap then copy the 'new convention'.

Personally I believe that for some content, e.g. a Tumblr style blog, the nav-bar at the top (and fixed) makes a lot of sense. If you also have pet-peeve infinite scroll (as many do on Tumblr blogs + Pinterest), then it is helpful to have a fixed header as there is no footer.

I disable them in most places by simply turning off Javascript (with the Quick Javascript Switcher chrome extension).

One place that didn't work is at Forbes.com because they're using CSS to implement that particular annoyance.

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