Sticky 'headers' that disappear when you scroll down, and appear when you scroll up. I hate them so much. It hurts my brain to see the stupid thing appear and disappear constantly if I scroll around a page.
The worst part is you can't even zap them out of the way with something like uBlock, because then there's no header even when you're at the top of the page. >:(
EDIT: Whoops, flipped the directions. Complaint still stands though.
God yes. For some reason, I automatically scroll in such a way that I always keep what I'm reading at the very top of the screen. Which means that every time I want to reread a sentence I first have to scroll past the header.
Screen real-estate for legitimate content is often at a premium and then they go and steal some of that land with sticky headers and or footers. I occasionally run across mobile sites that use both at the same time, while throwing in ads here and there, it's an atrocious experience.
Yes but then I think they should leave the header at the top of the page. If I need it I'll scroll all the way back up! Don't make it randomly re-appear and cover the text I wanted to see because I decided to re-read that last paragraph.
This is literally the best ux pattern you can have. It is intuitive - user immediately discovers it when performing the obvious action, it increases the user experience (more text to read) without any real downside.
It is the first thing I suggest to anyone when I see someone didn't implement it.
This is only true if you assume users always scroll down while reading and the only reason they scroll up is to find the header... but many of us scroll up and down while reading and find the re-appearance of the header to interfere with our goal of reading the content. So there is a clear downside for us "up and down" readers.
I don't know what portion of users we are though, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one!
I consider it context-dependent. If a site is intended for users to jump around to different pages often, then sticky headers make sense. If it’s designed for long-form articles or scrolling through feeds, then non-sticky headers make sense. When I have implemented them on my own sites, I try to keep them minimal and unobtrusive. But I also have never heard this complaint specifically, until now.
When a user wants to return to the navigation bar at the top he scrolls up. The navigation bar then immediately gets nearer.
The user discovery happens because the act he performs provides the exact intent you need to give him the shortcut.
Also for clarity this is only relevant for content based sites and not apps.
It is vanishingly rare for users to scroll up when reading content unless they want to reach the top
>It is vanishingly rare for users to scroll up when reading content unless they want to reach the top
This assumption is the problem. No, it is not rare for users to scroll up while reading. People are not perfect machines that read everything in one pass and understand it fully.
They may go back to re-read, or look at an earlier image or figure in the text, or otherwise. Sometimes people zone out for a minute and find they 'read' with their eyes but didn't actually take in the content. That requires going back.
For me, scrolling up to re-read is a basic use case of a web page. If it can't do that properly, it has failed.
That’s not why user scrolls up, or at least not the only reason. For example, reading this discussion I constantly scroll up and down to center the text on screen.
If the header only appears after scrolling up for a bit then it’s not so bad, but most implementations show the header after scrolling 1px up. That’s infuriating.
It's awful for the user. There is no reason why scrolling up should perform any other action then scrolling up the content. Zero benefit for anybody involved.
> This post purposefully ignores the reduced motion preference to give everyone the same truly terrible experience. I am sorry. Please use your browser’s reader mode.
"Reader Mode" shouldn't even be a special mode. It should just be the default browsing experience, and users who want all this styling crap should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something.
I want a reader mode that renders the page as if it were in an extremely tall window (ie. 10+ screens tall), then gives me a scrollable view of that static image of the rendered page. My browser should lie to the page on my behalf, and make it behave as if everything were already on-screen.
Materialistic[0] effectively does this (minus the screenshot part), not intentional I think (I belive it makes the webview as tall as the requested page and then uses the OS native scroll widget to add a scrollbar for it). The problem I regularly encounter with this is sites that have a vertically centered popup (cookie banner, newsletter, etc.), with a backdrop that obscures the whole page. You first have to scroll down quite a bit (half the size of the article) to be able to click the popup away.
This. It's fundamentally a social problem. The moment that reader mode becomes the default, they'll start gradually extending it with "useful" additions until it's just as bloated and painful again, and then we'll have some rebrand of the concept of reader mode, and the cycle starts anew.
"Why can't we have a functional version of the site for the blind, and the normal one for everyone else?"
"should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something."
Bwahahaha, +1! This reminds me of calling Windows XP's default motif "Fisher-Price" mode. Which, sadly, looks professional and efficient compared to Windows (and, increasingly, the Mac) today.
I like that Apple was trying somwthing that has a little more texture and soul to it, but Liquid glass needs a lot of work to be made more subtle and usable. 10 out of 10 idea, 3 out of 10 execution.
I actually think modern windows looks nice. It isn't nearly as good as the classic 9x look, but fluent obviously is a response to the visual shitshow that was 10
Big Sur made me take back every Fischer Price comment I ever made about Windows XP. I didn't think it was possible to make a more childish UI than Aqua, but here we are.
what a good idea to have this automatically come up when the page opens, and perhaps give user a few seconds to press escape to get rid of it, if needed
I thought this was going to be about iOS and how now (as of iOS 26) there is a "fade out" at the top of every web page (around the notch/top-edge area).
When scrolling/reading a web page, it literally changes that section of the text so that it fades to gray.
So, "everything scroll fades".
I couldn't find a way to turn it off. Quite irritating, IMHO.
EDITED TO ADD ELABORATION: The issue with iOS "scroll fade" text color in Safari near the top notch is that this makes that top-edge-text "dynamic" (changing) and thus "draws attention" to it visually, thus competing for eyeball attention when I am probably actually reading somewhere further down on the page. Also, I would still like to be able to glance up to the topmost visible text if wanted, without having to adjust to its different and less visible colors. Apple designers should know all this. Further, I'd say the page text color should probably by default respect what the web page designer configured it as, and not have the OS change that text color (unless the user gets fancy and requests an override with dark mode or whatever settings).
This article's critique seems valid, too (more generically about "scroll fade" in interfaces, e.g. web pages, which seems to mostly be about items appearing gradually via motion). Personally, I see less of that these days, compared to making every page in an OS fade out where unnecessary.
Even better iOS example of not just "scroll fade" but regressive and incompetent UI design: the moving of Music's playback controls from the empty area at the top of the window into the content-browser area... where the controls are "transparent" and overlap the text and thumbnail images there. And all that stuff in the content-browser pane? Yep, it scroll-fades.
The poster seems to be implying that this effect is prevalent across the web, yet i'm seeing it for the very first time on that post. (And, indeed, it's annoying. My eyes can't read when there's animation going on nearby.)
The goldfish animation along the bottom is epic and i will have to mine that bit for reuse somewhere :).
Anthropic uses it across all their websites, here's a typical example where the effect is obvious as you scroll down: https://claude.com/solutions/agents
I could be wrong, but my simple guess is that it's become widespread in LLM-generated websites partly because of Anthropic's own style guides getting adopted through Claude-bundled skills and such.
It is partly to blame, yes. This is from Claude’s official frontend skill:
“Motion: Use animations for effects and micro-interactions. Prioritize CSS-only solutions for HTML. Use Motion library for React when available. Focus on high-impact moments: one well-orchestrated page load with staggered reveals (animation-delay) creates more delight than scattered micro-interactions. Use scroll-triggering and hover states that surprise.”
Who thinks like this? The last thing I want on a website is surprise. I want to do what I came there to do, the same way it worked last time, and then get on with my day.
On a Web site or anywhere else. Apple, Microsoft, "flat design," and peek-a-boo UI all insult the user and waste his time by turning an important tool into an Advent calendar.
That's a bit different since those are separate chunks of content rather than running prose (and they're mainly meaningless marketing fluff anyway). I don't find it all that annoying compared to the original article.
It's still incredibly insulting to waste the user's time trying to force them to read the page sequentially instead of being able to immediately scroll to the chunk of content they are actually trying to find. Especially if it is not the user's first visit to the page.
This is a great example of LLM feedback loops. Anthropic's site uses scroll fade, Claude's training data includes Anthropic's site, Claude recommends scroll fade to users, those sites become future training data. The web converges on one aesthetic and nobody remembers choosing it.
Are the little hand animation graphics meant to flicker like they're an epilepsy test? That was so awful I didn't have brain power left to notice the fade scroll.
> The poster seems to be implying that this effect is prevalent across the web
Because it is.
For sites with dynamic content (social media, news, etc.), it doesn't happen.
But commercial sites trying to convince you to use their product, they're incredibly common. It's not always a fade in exactly like this site does it. Sometimes it's content sliding in from the side.
It's incredibly pervasive on SaaS marketing pages.
> It's incredibly pervasive on SaaS marketing pages.
That would explain my ignorance of it - such sites are in the bottom negligible percentage of sites which i might accidentally visit but never purposely do.
I was redesigning a website of mine and Claude suggested to add this as an animation. My theory is that, if claude is confident in a suggestion, a lot of other people have done the same.
The scroll fade on that site is comparatively inoffensive (comparatively), because you messed with scrolling itself, which is one of the worst things you can do, taking over and ruining inertia. You’re literally going out of your way to make things worse. The ONLY time scrolljacking of any kind is acceptable is for things like maps where there is no “normal”.
Hijacking native scroll behavior to badly reimplement anything remotely like scrolling is wrong even in a gaming context. But if you're implementing Half Life 2 in a browser, where the user no longer has a normal cursor, then hijacking scrolling to implement the weapon switcher is fine.
You probably haven't noticed it before because when it's done well, it's a subtle and pleasant effect that can be used to draw your attention to particular elements on the page.
This site is intentionally doing it very poorly to make a point. Really, the takeaway should be don't do things poorly. But that's kind of obvious.
Yes, if you make things only slightly worse it's better than if you make them a lot worse. But neither is quite as good as not deliberately making things worse.
It's always awful. This site is exagerated in degree, but in kind it's merely on the scale of awful.
Computers should not waste my time. Even if eyes are 10ms faster than the awful fade, if a million people see it, that's almost three hours of human life down the drain.
And when scrolling fast, or far, it's not uncommon to have it waste a second of human time. A million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".
It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time.
The web is already slow. No need to deliberately spend effort to make it even slower.
"It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time."
And this is what people have become way, WAY too tolerant of. The deliberate theft of customers' time. While this is obviously a very minor example, there are lots and lots of others that aren't.
I’m a fast scroller and skimmer. Info scroll down and the text is not there I’ll just assume that the site is shot and close it. Ain’t nobody got 200ms to wait for a god damn fade in when there’s an infinite amount of sites out there to discover.
I don't have a strong opinion either way on the effect, but I do have to say that I always find it amusing how fatalistic HN can sometimes be over the most minor cosmetic inconveniences, couching them as "wasting (large amounts of) humanity's time" and "disrespecting people" as if we're talking about something far more serious than little animations on a webpage.
I mean, you might not like it, and that's fair and understandable, but is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.
I mean, like the other commenter I would just close the page instead of enduring it.
But yes, in fact if this page succeeds then it's wasting human life on things as productive as spam phone calls. People have solved the latter by simply not answering for unknown numbers.
Not sure what you mean by "fatalistic". To the point where I'm not sure that's the word you mean. It's fatalistic as in fate. Maybe you mean morbid?
Standing in line at the DMV is also all "counting flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all"? But even at the DMV it's (hopefully) not done maliciously.
> cosmetic inconveniences
Sometimes things suck. That's not remotely as frustrating as knowing that someone went out of their way to make your life worse.
> is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.
If we capped all laptop CPUs to 600MHz, would it really be that big of a deal? Maybe they did it because of the acoustic preference of not needing to spin the fans as much, and therefore you are not allowed faster CPUs?
They didn't go out of their way to make your life worse. They went out of their way to design something they thought you would like, but you didn't like it.
> million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".
This is the wrong conclusion. The amount of work that can be accomplished summing one second from 38 million people is approximately zero - much different from stealing 1 day from 38 people or 1 hour from 912.
I’ve seen the mostly in personal website templates used by people that would have had very sparkly MySpace profiles had they been creating for the web back then.
It definitely isn't prevalent, and usually is for "feature" pieces (like an expose on the Washington Post back when they were a real newspaper), along with product pages.
Apple uses it for their various pages, and it is legitimately annoying-
My biggest annoyance: letting scripts control the history. I can imagine that someone thought "oh it'll be nice, you can use it for pages of an app". But the reality is that people are not nice and it gets used maliciously all the damn time. It should not be allowed.
The web should be a method of delivering documents exclusively, and be limited to the kinds of things you can do with other computerized documents (the basics, but also Audio, Video, Animations, hyperlinking, etc.)
I'd be okay with locking these heavily-abused features behind a "web app mode" that the user has to enable on a per-site basis. It should include a restriction forcing all content to come from the same origin, so that the browser in that mode won't make it easy for web apps to include third-party tracking or advertising.
I'm not against animations in UI design but these should be used purposefully to direct the user's attention on something or for minimal aesthetic effect. When everything is moving it's just like adding a ton of ketchup to everything.
I worked for a client who was all about scrolljacking. Then he discovered parallax effect, and there was no looking back. He fired me, and got another team who didn't have any opinions.
Now the page stutters on every device other than iPhone 16+ with 5G. :shrug:
I feel like the scroll fade fad is misunderstanding layered on bugs, turtles all the way down.
Once upon a time, developers implemented lazy loading of images, to save bandwidth. However, some developers implemented it poorly, waiting until the moment an image is scrolled on-screen to even start loading it, leading to a visible blip as you scroll.
(The better way would be to load an additional pageful of images beyond the current scroll view, which would provide enough time to load before scrolling into view at least most of the time. However, this doesn't maximally save bandwidth and some developers don't make good tradeoffs between diminishing returns on saving bandwidth vs. visibly degraded UX.)
Then, designers saw the blip-into-view effect, thought it was an intentional visual effect (rather than an artifact of poorly implemented lazy loading), but thought, oh, I'll fix it so it looks nice, with fading.
And here we are with a dumb visual fad originating from a bug without realizing it was a bug.
I'm not sure it's feasible to prove or disprove how this design trend started. I wouldn't be shocked if it was true, but I also wouldn't be shocked if it wasn't. I'd be more surprised if we ever found out for sure one way or another than about what the truth is.
I haven't dug into the history to see if this is really how it happened. I'd actually feel better if it wasn't true but it's the thought that occurred to me when I noticed the scroll fade effect becoming popular.
Essentially, for any animation that gets repeated, it should decrease in duration over time. This makes things impactful when they're first being displayed, but they very quickly approach an extremely minimal state, making things feel snappy.
Hah, the point has certainly been made. Absolute Barf-o-Rama.
I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness, which hasn’t really improved as an adult, and this page immediately made me feel like I’m going to throw up. Had to switch to reader mode after the first image. I was always the kid who couldn’t read in the car, and was always groggy on long road trips because of Dramamine (side note, Meclizine has significantly improved my life, as it has largely the same effect without drowsiness). As an adult I’m fine as long as I’m in the front seat, public transit is terrible for me. Elevators are tiny torture chambers, especially when stopping on multiple floors. And it’s cumulative, the sensation becomes worse the more I’m exposed to it over the course of a day (I have a mental “theme park budget” in my head of how many rides I can comfortably do!). VR can’t have any motion that isn’t firmly anchored to a sense of place (space ship/driving sims are okay though!)
I’m glad awareness is being raised about this, but I’m curious what websites are using this now? Is it just personal blogs and the like right now? I definitely would have noticed this cropping up on websites I frequent.
> As an adult I’m fine as long as I’m in the front seat, public transit is terrible for me.
Me too! The worst part about this is anytime there's more than two adults in the vehicle, the "front seat" has all sorts of social expectations and courtesies. I once mentioned that I get motion sick when not in the front seat, and I could tell that nobody believed me and thought it was an uncool way to try and guilt people into letting me monopolize the favored chair. After that I don't bother, but do try to avoid shared cars because in those I'll be quietly sitting in a torture chamber while others around me don't understand.
Also, good God those drivers whould constantly gas-brake-gas-gas-brake-gas-brake-brake-gas. I get it when all the sudden traffic rapidly and unexpectedly slows down, but so many people seem to always be pressing at least one pedal, never coasting. It's torture
I couldn't do the mandatory onboarding training at a job once because the course web app had heavy scroll fade, and I got nauseous after a few minutes. I tried every few hours for weeks. Eventually I said I couldn't do it. They had to print it out to pdf for me, and gave me a pass on the courses that were dependent on animation to work.
I used to use WikiTok [1] on my phone at times, but now they’ve introduced »words appear word by word« on the mobile version. Baffles me, why one would hide and gradually reveal any sort of content. It’s nauseating!
They get hate because they are almost always annoying and distract from the actual content. Nobody cares how creative your web page design is if it sucks to use so badly that a plain text page would be better.
I can only add another aberration that it just started to happen on my browsers without even updating or doing anything at all: I get the master volume raised, I mean not the YouTube volume, but the volume that is reported in my OS.
I truly don't know how this is possible or how should I turn it off completely. There are some settings in Firefox but the ones I have tried do not work.
This is one of the worst things I have seen in many years, along with all the other aberrations that are already spread on the net.
Scrolling to the bottom then forcing me to click "show more"? Lazy. A truly horrible experience. I don't know how anyone could think that is a good idea. The worst offenders are the ones showing me products. You might as well not have pages of products at all. Just tell me these 12 are the only ones you have because I've already lost interest. Not that most web stores are any good - most have no useful ability to search or browse so finding anything is like digging through a junk drawer. It all screams "we hate selling product, please go away".
Next worst? Everything Google makes and all the fools who copied them: scroll down, scrolling hard stops, then a few seconds later the next segment of content loads. The scrollbar position is naught but lies. WHY??? Are you proud of that? Because you shouldn't be. You should be ashamed. Demand-load the content behind the scenes so scrolling is continuous and smooth. If the user scrolls fast then skip pages and/or cancel prior requests. The scrolling is the priority, lazy-load the content as needed... but for f*k sake don't do what Google does.
The top worst: hijacking scrolling for any form of animation or to change direction. Absolutely horrid and I leave any webpage that does this out of spite. This just screams "I'M A DESIGNER, LOOK AT MEEEEE!!!!!". It is code equivalent of being "too clever", but for UX. If you don't want people to buy your product or signup for your service but instead be impressed by your ability to vomit out D-E-S-I-G-N then by all means proceed. Everyone is guilty of this, even those who should know better.
I'll add having a floating header that covers the top portion of the page, and only appears when you scroll up. I like to read text in the top third of the page, then scroll down so the lines I'm reading are still in the top third of the page. With the height of my monitor that's the most comfortable position, this should usually be the case if following common ergonomic guidelines. If I scroll up, very often such a header will appear & cover the text I was trying to scroll up to read, so I have to scroll farther. Then it's visible, so I scroll down to move it back up to the top portion of the page as the header goes away. Lather, rinse, repeat, install a uBlock origin filter to get rid of floating headers.
What sucks with scroll fade is when it fades slower than one can read or scroll.
Fading the entire content very fast, so fast that it's barely perceptible is actually better on the eyes.
Blinking hurts. Fast changing contrast hurts. The fade is a natural effect I use everywhere almost. My eyes never complained, rather are grateful for the small effort it takes to get right
I've always been under the impression it was lazy loading the page to increase page loading times for content above the fold? At least this was why I started using it about 8 years ago.
Its like anything though. I think people just thought it was a cool effect and so it wasn't about page speed any more, it was just about something people used to add some panache to their sites.
Kind of like people who've been abusing modals for the last decade or so. lol
I'm not a web dev but if the goal is to improve load times, I'd think it would make more sense to load the full article text up front, and lazy load heavier data like images and video? I've seen a lot of websites that do it that way.
Oh they know, but it's requested because clients want a fancy website, and just having fucking text on the fucking screen explaining what you fucking sell is boooooring.
And also completely functional and accessible but where's the fun in that?
I'm someone who loves over-the-top, creative-for-the-sake-of-creative web design, even for something primarily text-based like a blog post, I 100% sympathize with and want to accommodate those who don't.
I think `prefers-tacky` is a brilliant idea! It means excess decorative images could avoid even being downloaded if the user so chooses.
It’s kind of like when someone wants you to read something, so they hold the thing to read for you and read it out loud, while moving their finger at the words they’re currently reading. I know how to read!!!
I'm guilty of this as well. https://kraa.io/about has some fade-in animation for the intro text – driven by wanting the initial impression to be focused/minimal and 'unravel' as you go. I take it that most HN folks would vastly prefer to NOT have this?
I’ll say as someone who suffers from severe motion sickness and the OP site makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, that your site does the fade in fast enough that it doesn’t give me any discomfort. Seems fine to me. Maybe I should consider being a consultant for vestibular motion sickness accessibility, haha. I’d get paid to answer “on a scale of 1-10, how pukey does this app make you feel?”
I think it looks fine except it's missing a more obvious hint that there's more to see when I scroll. The one that's there is just textual and very delayed.
Not sure if I second this or not. I did want to scroll, but I don't know how much of that was influenced from the context or the extreme minimalism making me want to look for more - I'm interested in how I would have reacted to the site not knowing it had scroll fade. I could see an argument with the "Don't Make Me Think" principle.
Amen. So cathartic to see someone publish the post I've been wanting to write for a while, and with a much better title.
Also: I've noticed a new abuse recently of sites implementing scroll momentum on desktop — has anyone else seen this? I couldn't believe it, but there it was.
This terrible idea is a parody of a good idea from game design - LOD cross-fade. When a distant object changes from a low level of detail representation to a higher one, or vice versa, the change is best done as a cross fade. The old one fades out to transparent, the new one fades in from transparent.
This is done to hide the change, not as a creative effect. The human visual system is very sensitive to fast changes. But below half a second, smooth changes are not too noticeable.
With this trick, plus a slight amount of distance haze, you can get away with quite low detail distant models. That's part of how GTA V does those long vistas efficiently.
Here's a long drive around the GTA V world.[1] Watch how background objects change. Many distant background objects start out with very low detail. Watch power line towers, for example, which are very low detail until about 100m range. The cross-fade to a better model takes about a half second. Active players don't notice.
Really, almost any animation or hijacking on scrolling should be abolished. It's one of the most disgusting things to encounter on a webpage.
I don't want your product to spin while I scroll down. I don't want animations or boxes to start appearing or disappearing. I don't want helpful tooltips, popups, or "I hope you enjoyed this" notifications to appear as I scroll.
What I want when I scroll is for the page to move, either up or down, in a completely consistent manner. I want to be able to reasonably predict what I'll see as I go up or down.
Apple loves this shit. Fortunately they aren't AS BAD as they once were, but you'll still encounter it on their product pages.
My least favorite by far is the “multi section” webpage design. Where the page is split into multiple whole-screen sections and scrolling the mouse wheel alternates between either moving between sections or playing the animations of that section. Yes please make my scroll wheel only sometimes actually scroll the page and other times rotate a graphic for way too long thanks
Agree. I understand why people like those animations and sometimes even i want to implement these in my website with GSAP, but then i remember that these animations make my content harder to read.
Another major pisser is sites that deliberately disable zooming on their mobile incarnations. WTF, WHY? My favorite was when Google imperiously declared that it would "punish" "non-mobile-friendly" sites in their search results... but then disabled zooming on its own pages.
I much prefer to have websites simple at all times. I
understand that stylish means it must look good and
elegant, but this often ends up annoying me to no ends.
Without ublock origin I would go nuts. I use it more
to get rid of HTML I don't want to see. All pop-ups
and slide-ins for instance. These things should never
ever happen. Any notification should happen differently,
or not at all. Often it is "please donate to us" -
I understand their use case, but how is this relevant
to my use case?
If you design the animation to be way over the top like this, and then design the page to use it on every line then of course it looks like shit.
This is like arguing against any amount of sugar in food and then shoveling it into someone's mouth to try to prove your point. It's disingenuous and you aren't proving anything. I don't even think the top agreeing comments here are coming from web devs or the target users.
Fading in is justifiable when you're adding new content on top of existing content, and need to draw attention to the fact that something changed in that part of the screen. None of that applies in the case of fade-in during scrolling. The user is already scrolling, everything on screen is moving, and new content is already expected to be coming in to view at the bottom of the window. Adding animations on top of all of that doesn't help anything, and just distracts from and delays presentation of the content the user was already trying to reveal.
Something else scroll-related I personally hate:
Sticky 'headers' that disappear when you scroll down, and appear when you scroll up. I hate them so much. It hurts my brain to see the stupid thing appear and disappear constantly if I scroll around a page.
The worst part is you can't even zap them out of the way with something like uBlock, because then there's no header even when you're at the top of the page. >:(
EDIT: Whoops, flipped the directions. Complaint still stands though.
God yes. For some reason, I automatically scroll in such a way that I always keep what I'm reading at the very top of the screen. Which means that every time I want to reread a sentence I first have to scroll past the header.
This only really works easily on desktop and requires a click, but is very satisfying to use:
https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
Also if anything it should disappear when scrolling down and appear when scrolling up.
Oh god yes I absolutely hate those. Who on earth thought that was a good idea.
There is a special circle in hell where designers of such sites have to actually use the sites they design.
Oh. This. Tho I solved that with userstyles.
Joke's on you, we implement all animations in JS
Interesting, I find sticky headers to be the bane of my existence, and the ones that disappear but reappear on scroll up are a lesser evil
same thing intersects with ios safari when it hides top and bottom tool bars, hate that too.
and with the website doing the same thing, it's a mess.
Screen real-estate for legitimate content is often at a premium and then they go and steal some of that land with sticky headers and or footers. I occasionally run across mobile sites that use both at the same time, while throwing in ads here and there, it's an atrocious experience.
Yes but then I think they should leave the header at the top of the page. If I need it I'll scroll all the way back up! Don't make it randomly re-appear and cover the text I wanted to see because I decided to re-read that last paragraph.
Especially since mobile browsers typically have a shortcut for scroll-all-the-way-to-the-top
This is literally the best ux pattern you can have. It is intuitive - user immediately discovers it when performing the obvious action, it increases the user experience (more text to read) without any real downside.
It is the first thing I suggest to anyone when I see someone didn't implement it.
I've never heard a complaint about it until now.
This is only true if you assume users always scroll down while reading and the only reason they scroll up is to find the header... but many of us scroll up and down while reading and find the re-appearance of the header to interfere with our goal of reading the content. So there is a clear downside for us "up and down" readers.
I don't know what portion of users we are though, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one!
I consider it context-dependent. If a site is intended for users to jump around to different pages often, then sticky headers make sense. If it’s designed for long-form articles or scrolling through feeds, then non-sticky headers make sense. When I have implemented them on my own sites, I try to keep them minimal and unobtrusive. But I also have never heard this complaint specifically, until now.
The user discovers it because it is practically forced on them. It is awful UI.
When a user wants to return to the navigation bar at the top he scrolls up. The navigation bar then immediately gets nearer.
The user discovery happens because the act he performs provides the exact intent you need to give him the shortcut.
Also for clarity this is only relevant for content based sites and not apps. It is vanishingly rare for users to scroll up when reading content unless they want to reach the top
>It is vanishingly rare for users to scroll up when reading content unless they want to reach the top
This assumption is the problem. No, it is not rare for users to scroll up while reading. People are not perfect machines that read everything in one pass and understand it fully.
They may go back to re-read, or look at an earlier image or figure in the text, or otherwise. Sometimes people zone out for a minute and find they 'read' with their eyes but didn't actually take in the content. That requires going back.
For me, scrolling up to re-read is a basic use case of a web page. If it can't do that properly, it has failed.
That’s not why user scrolls up, or at least not the only reason. For example, reading this discussion I constantly scroll up and down to center the text on screen.
If the header only appears after scrolling up for a bit then it’s not so bad, but most implementations show the header after scrolling 1px up. That’s infuriating.
I absolutely hate it. If you haven't heard a complaint about it, you haven't tried hard enough to get feedback.
There is no context which makes it OK.
It's awful for the user. There is no reason why scrolling up should perform any other action then scrolling up the content. Zero benefit for anybody involved.
You could just have a "hide bar" button. Dunno how you get it back, maybe put your design smarts there.
Stop making things "intuitive" and expose explicit options to users.
> This post purposefully ignores the reduced motion preference to give everyone the same truly terrible experience. I am sorry. Please use your browser’s reader mode.
"Reader Mode" shouldn't even be a special mode. It should just be the default browsing experience, and users who want all this styling crap should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something.
I want a reader mode that renders the page as if it were in an extremely tall window (ie. 10+ screens tall), then gives me a scrollable view of that static image of the rendered page. My browser should lie to the page on my behalf, and make it behave as if everything were already on-screen.
Materialistic[0] effectively does this (minus the screenshot part), not intentional I think (I belive it makes the webview as tall as the requested page and then uses the OS native scroll widget to add a scrollbar for it). The problem I regularly encounter with this is sites that have a vertically centered popup (cookie banner, newsletter, etc.), with a backdrop that obscures the whole page. You first have to scroll down quite a bit (half the size of the article) to be able to click the popup away.
[0]:https://github.com/hidroh/materialistic
the reason "reader mode" isn't the default is to discourage website authors from intentionally breaking reader mode
-_-
This. It's fundamentally a social problem. The moment that reader mode becomes the default, they'll start gradually extending it with "useful" additions until it's just as bloated and painful again, and then we'll have some rebrand of the concept of reader mode, and the cycle starts anew.
"Why can't we have a functional version of the site for the blind, and the normal one for everyone else?"
'We have that! It's called HTML!"
Edit: Earlier version of this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224961
"should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something."
Bwahahaha, +1! This reminds me of calling Windows XP's default motif "Fisher-Price" mode. Which, sadly, looks professional and efficient compared to Windows (and, increasingly, the Mac) today.
I like that Apple was trying somwthing that has a little more texture and soul to it, but Liquid glass needs a lot of work to be made more subtle and usable. 10 out of 10 idea, 3 out of 10 execution.
I actually think modern windows looks nice. It isn't nearly as good as the classic 9x look, but fluent obviously is a response to the visual shitshow that was 10
Big Sur made me take back every Fischer Price comment I ever made about Windows XP. I didn't think it was possible to make a more childish UI than Aqua, but here we are.
On MacOS and iOS you can set reader mode as default. You should set reader mode as default.
what a good idea to have this automatically come up when the page opens, and perhaps give user a few seconds to press escape to get rid of it, if needed
Why just a few seconds? In reader mode you can press escape any time to close it.
I thought this was going to be about iOS and how now (as of iOS 26) there is a "fade out" at the top of every web page (around the notch/top-edge area).
When scrolling/reading a web page, it literally changes that section of the text so that it fades to gray.
So, "everything scroll fades".
I couldn't find a way to turn it off. Quite irritating, IMHO.
EDITED TO ADD ELABORATION: The issue with iOS "scroll fade" text color in Safari near the top notch is that this makes that top-edge-text "dynamic" (changing) and thus "draws attention" to it visually, thus competing for eyeball attention when I am probably actually reading somewhere further down on the page. Also, I would still like to be able to glance up to the topmost visible text if wanted, without having to adjust to its different and less visible colors. Apple designers should know all this. Further, I'd say the page text color should probably by default respect what the web page designer configured it as, and not have the OS change that text color (unless the user gets fancy and requests an override with dark mode or whatever settings).
This article's critique seems valid, too (more generically about "scroll fade" in interfaces, e.g. web pages, which seems to mostly be about items appearing gradually via motion). Personally, I see less of that these days, compared to making every page in an OS fade out where unnecessary.
Even better iOS example of not just "scroll fade" but regressive and incompetent UI design: the moving of Music's playback controls from the empty area at the top of the window into the content-browser area... where the controls are "transparent" and overlap the text and thumbnail images there. And all that stuff in the content-browser pane? Yep, it scroll-fades.
I turned on "Reduce Transparency", and instead of a fade, it turns the top and bottom sections of the screen into blank white space.
My "edge to edge screen" iPhone now resembles the last generation of iPhones with home button from 2017.
On iOS 26 (up to date as of this comment), the Orion web browser from Kagi does not have this problem.
It also supports firefox and chrome extensions, so you can use things like UBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.
It's that bad?
How about they give us back small iPhones with 4" screens then and whoever wants the fade can imagine it outside the physical phone?
On my iPhone 13 Mini, the space dedicated to showing browser content is around 4.25" diagonal with the Safari fade, so we're not that far off.
I've managed to avoid being tricked into upgrading to 26 so far, and every week I find a new reason not to.
The poster seems to be implying that this effect is prevalent across the web, yet i'm seeing it for the very first time on that post. (And, indeed, it's annoying. My eyes can't read when there's animation going on nearby.)
The goldfish animation along the bottom is epic and i will have to mine that bit for reuse somewhere :).
Anthropic uses it across all their websites, here's a typical example where the effect is obvious as you scroll down: https://claude.com/solutions/agents
I could be wrong, but my simple guess is that it's become widespread in LLM-generated websites partly because of Anthropic's own style guides getting adopted through Claude-bundled skills and such.
It is partly to blame, yes. This is from Claude’s official frontend skill:
“Motion: Use animations for effects and micro-interactions. Prioritize CSS-only solutions for HTML. Use Motion library for React when available. Focus on high-impact moments: one well-orchestrated page load with staggered reveals (animation-delay) creates more delight than scattered micro-interactions. Use scroll-triggering and hover states that surprise.”
Who thinks like this? The last thing I want on a website is surprise. I want to do what I came there to do, the same way it worked last time, and then get on with my day.
On a Web site or anywhere else. Apple, Microsoft, "flat design," and peek-a-boo UI all insult the user and waste his time by turning an important tool into an Advent calendar.
s/micro intentions/micro aggressions/
> creates more delight
ARE YOU NOT DELIGHTED?
That's a bit different since those are separate chunks of content rather than running prose (and they're mainly meaningless marketing fluff anyway). I don't find it all that annoying compared to the original article.
It's still incredibly insulting to waste the user's time trying to force them to read the page sequentially instead of being able to immediately scroll to the chunk of content they are actually trying to find. Especially if it is not the user's first visit to the page.
Studies show that viewer comprehension is strictly worse for presentations that use “build” animations vs ones that do not.
I assume the study results would be the same if they were repeated using fade scrolls.
It's not as bad because it's a much faster fade in, but I still find it incredibly obnoxious.
On top of that, that page took 10 seconds to load. On a Gbit network connection, lol
This is a great example of LLM feedback loops. Anthropic's site uses scroll fade, Claude's training data includes Anthropic's site, Claude recommends scroll fade to users, those sites become future training data. The web converges on one aesthetic and nobody remembers choosing it.
https://webflow.com/ is what i blame for the fade-in on scroll module.
15 years ago it did look very polished, boutique, professional. Now that it's a module everyone can do, everyone literally does it for every module.
Also there's tailwind that likely has a module for all the modules in webflow.
Are the little hand animation graphics meant to flicker like they're an epilepsy test? That was so awful I didn't have brain power left to notice the fade scroll.
You are absolutely right!
Parts also seem to ignore prefers-reduced-motion.
the effect in this example fine though, and not obnoxious like OPs? I don't get it
> The poster seems to be implying that this effect is prevalent across the web
Because it is.
For sites with dynamic content (social media, news, etc.), it doesn't happen.
But commercial sites trying to convince you to use their product, they're incredibly common. It's not always a fade in exactly like this site does it. Sometimes it's content sliding in from the side.
It's incredibly pervasive on SaaS marketing pages.
> It's incredibly pervasive on SaaS marketing pages.
That would explain my ignorance of it - such sites are in the bottom negligible percentage of sites which i might accidentally visit but never purposely do.
I was redesigning a website of mine and Claude suggested to add this as an animation. My theory is that, if claude is confident in a suggestion, a lot of other people have done the same.
Maybe it's too subtle to notice.
Edit: on odeva.nl
The scroll fade on that site is comparatively inoffensive (comparatively), because you messed with scrolling itself, which is one of the worst things you can do, taking over and ruining inertia. You’re literally going out of your way to make things worse. The ONLY time scrolljacking of any kind is acceptable is for things like maps where there is no “normal”.
Or for a game, where it's part of the interface.
Got an example of what you mean? Because if you mean the only thing I can think of, I very strongly disagree.
Hijacking native scroll behavior to badly reimplement anything remotely like scrolling is wrong even in a gaming context. But if you're implementing Half Life 2 in a browser, where the user no longer has a normal cursor, then hijacking scrolling to implement the weapon switcher is fine.
You probably haven't noticed it before because when it's done well, it's a subtle and pleasant effect that can be used to draw your attention to particular elements on the page.
This site is intentionally doing it very poorly to make a point. Really, the takeaway should be don't do things poorly. But that's kind of obvious.
> when it's done well, it's a subtle and pleasant effect
I've seen it quite a lot, but apparently I've never seen it done well. It's a very annoying effect that chases me away from the site using it.
Not doing it at all would be better still. It's really annoying.
Fade in in scroll will always be slower than the reading speed of a significant percentage of population.
This becomes worse for people who just skim content, re-read the text, or want to quickly scroll to a specific place in text
It can speed up the loading of the above-the-fold content because the images on the rest of the page can be loaded as the user scrolls closer to them.
You can do this with just the 'loading' attribute on img elements and let the browser handle it without the gratuitous animations:
So you agree that for text, it should NEVER be used. And you are only arguing for lazy loading of images?
Yes, if you make things only slightly worse it's better than if you make them a lot worse. But neither is quite as good as not deliberately making things worse.
> when it's done well
It's always awful. This site is exagerated in degree, but in kind it's merely on the scale of awful.
Computers should not waste my time. Even if eyes are 10ms faster than the awful fade, if a million people see it, that's almost three hours of human life down the drain.
And when scrolling fast, or far, it's not uncommon to have it waste a second of human time. A million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".
It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time.
The web is already slow. No need to deliberately spend effort to make it even slower.
"It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time."
And this is what people have become way, WAY too tolerant of. The deliberate theft of customers' time. While this is obviously a very minor example, there are lots and lots of others that aren't.
Agree 100%!
I’m a fast scroller and skimmer. Info scroll down and the text is not there I’ll just assume that the site is shot and close it. Ain’t nobody got 200ms to wait for a god damn fade in when there’s an infinite amount of sites out there to discover.
I don't have a strong opinion either way on the effect, but I do have to say that I always find it amusing how fatalistic HN can sometimes be over the most minor cosmetic inconveniences, couching them as "wasting (large amounts of) humanity's time" and "disrespecting people" as if we're talking about something far more serious than little animations on a webpage.
I mean, you might not like it, and that's fair and understandable, but is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.
I mean, like the other commenter I would just close the page instead of enduring it.
But yes, in fact if this page succeeds then it's wasting human life on things as productive as spam phone calls. People have solved the latter by simply not answering for unknown numbers.
Not sure what you mean by "fatalistic". To the point where I'm not sure that's the word you mean. It's fatalistic as in fate. Maybe you mean morbid?
Standing in line at the DMV is also all "counting flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all"? But even at the DMV it's (hopefully) not done maliciously.
> cosmetic inconveniences
Sometimes things suck. That's not remotely as frustrating as knowing that someone went out of their way to make your life worse.
> is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.
If we capped all laptop CPUs to 600MHz, would it really be that big of a deal? Maybe they did it because of the acoustic preference of not needing to spin the fans as much, and therefore you are not allowed faster CPUs?
They didn't go out of their way to make your life worse. They went out of their way to design something they thought you would like, but you didn't like it.
> million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".
This is the wrong conclusion. The amount of work that can be accomplished summing one second from 38 million people is approximately zero - much different from stealing 1 day from 38 people or 1 hour from 912.
[dead]
https://history-of-animation.webflow.io/
Are you sure you don't have prefers-reduced-motion enabled? I just found out I already have it enabled when I went to look for how to enable it...
I’ve seen the mostly in personal website templates used by people that would have had very sparkly MySpace profiles had they been creating for the web back then.
It definitely isn't prevalent, and usually is for "feature" pieces (like an expose on the Washington Post back when they were a real newspaper), along with product pages.
Apple uses it for their various pages, and it is legitimately annoying-
https://www.apple.com/iphone/
Tesla is a fan as well-
https://www.tesla.com/models
Occasionally sites use lazy loaded images, and do a "fade in" effect when they're actually loaded. Nothing wrong with that particular use.
> https://www.tesla.com/models
Love how that page takes almost 10 seconds to load for the first time on a 200Mbps connection
> The goldfish
It goes where you click in the water area
I raise you one. Death to the parallax scroll. In fact, death to all scroll animations.
Scrolling should just move a fixed size view up and down a fixed sized page. Why on earth must everyone complicate it so much?
I don't understand why browsers ever let designers fuck up the scrolling mechanism in the first place. Why is that even possible?
Browsers have handed way too much control to web developers. "The web as a software SDK" was a terrible idea.
My biggest annoyance: letting scripts control the history. I can imagine that someone thought "oh it'll be nice, you can use it for pages of an app". But the reality is that people are not nice and it gets used maliciously all the damn time. It should not be allowed.
The web should be a method of delivering documents exclusively, and be limited to the kinds of things you can do with other computerized documents (the basics, but also Audio, Video, Animations, hyperlinking, etc.)
I'd be okay with locking these heavily-abused features behind a "web app mode" that the user has to enable on a per-site basis. It should include a restriction forcing all content to come from the same origin, so that the browser in that mode won't make it easy for web apps to include third-party tracking or advertising.
Death to scroll event override in general. Messes up my vimium smooth scrolling.
Absolutely.
I'm not against animations in UI design but these should be used purposefully to direct the user's attention on something or for minimal aesthetic effect. When everything is moving it's just like adding a ton of ketchup to everything.
I worked for a client who was all about scrolljacking. Then he discovered parallax effect, and there was no looking back. He fired me, and got another team who didn't have any opinions.
Now the page stutters on every device other than iPhone 16+ with 5G. :shrug:
I feel like the scroll fade fad is misunderstanding layered on bugs, turtles all the way down.
Once upon a time, developers implemented lazy loading of images, to save bandwidth. However, some developers implemented it poorly, waiting until the moment an image is scrolled on-screen to even start loading it, leading to a visible blip as you scroll.
(The better way would be to load an additional pageful of images beyond the current scroll view, which would provide enough time to load before scrolling into view at least most of the time. However, this doesn't maximally save bandwidth and some developers don't make good tradeoffs between diminishing returns on saving bandwidth vs. visibly degraded UX.)
Then, designers saw the blip-into-view effect, thought it was an intentional visual effect (rather than an artifact of poorly implemented lazy loading), but thought, oh, I'll fix it so it looks nice, with fading.
And here we are with a dumb visual fad originating from a bug without realizing it was a bug.
...is that really the story? It feels like these are two related, but different things.
I'm not sure it's feasible to prove or disprove how this design trend started. I wouldn't be shocked if it was true, but I also wouldn't be shocked if it wasn't. I'd be more surprised if we ever found out for sure one way or another than about what the truth is.
I haven't dug into the history to see if this is really how it happened. I'd actually feel better if it wasn't true but it's the thought that occurred to me when I noticed the scroll fade effect becoming popular.
There's a very simple fix I typically do when it comes to animations:
(formula exagerated for simplicity)Essentially, for any animation that gets repeated, it should decrease in duration over time. This makes things impactful when they're first being displayed, but they very quickly approach an extremely minimal state, making things feel snappy.
Gotta love the attention to detail at the end, that is illegible when selected too.
It's not realistic, though. Illegible sites never get that detail right.
They usually inhibit selection to protect their sacred text.
Hah, the point has certainly been made. Absolute Barf-o-Rama.
I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness, which hasn’t really improved as an adult, and this page immediately made me feel like I’m going to throw up. Had to switch to reader mode after the first image. I was always the kid who couldn’t read in the car, and was always groggy on long road trips because of Dramamine (side note, Meclizine has significantly improved my life, as it has largely the same effect without drowsiness). As an adult I’m fine as long as I’m in the front seat, public transit is terrible for me. Elevators are tiny torture chambers, especially when stopping on multiple floors. And it’s cumulative, the sensation becomes worse the more I’m exposed to it over the course of a day (I have a mental “theme park budget” in my head of how many rides I can comfortably do!). VR can’t have any motion that isn’t firmly anchored to a sense of place (space ship/driving sims are okay though!)
I’m glad awareness is being raised about this, but I’m curious what websites are using this now? Is it just personal blogs and the like right now? I definitely would have noticed this cropping up on websites I frequent.
> As an adult I’m fine as long as I’m in the front seat, public transit is terrible for me.
Me too! The worst part about this is anytime there's more than two adults in the vehicle, the "front seat" has all sorts of social expectations and courtesies. I once mentioned that I get motion sick when not in the front seat, and I could tell that nobody believed me and thought it was an uncool way to try and guilt people into letting me monopolize the favored chair. After that I don't bother, but do try to avoid shared cars because in those I'll be quietly sitting in a torture chamber while others around me don't understand.
Also, good God those drivers whould constantly gas-brake-gas-gas-brake-gas-brake-brake-gas. I get it when all the sudden traffic rapidly and unexpectedly slows down, but so many people seem to always be pressing at least one pedal, never coasting. It's torture
I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness
I don't, and yet I am also feeling nauseated after reading that page! What a truly awful experience.
I couldn't do the mandatory onboarding training at a job once because the course web app had heavy scroll fade, and I got nauseous after a few minutes. I tried every few hours for weeks. Eventually I said I couldn't do it. They had to print it out to pdf for me, and gave me a pass on the courses that were dependent on animation to work.
I used to use WikiTok [1] on my phone at times, but now they’ve introduced »words appear word by word« on the mobile version. Baffles me, why one would hide and gradually reveal any sort of content. It’s nauseating!
[1]: https://www.wikitok.io/
Looking at the main site, seems like it's branded as a "no AI frontend consultant".
First time I'm seeing a "no AI" used to differentiate a work for hire.
Can't say this wasn't obviously coming. Boutique hand-coded consultancies/software-houses are probably going to spring up a lot.
Why do web animations get so much hate with the HN crowd?
I think a website is similar to a painting. Some will make you dizzy by just looking at them, and others will be a minimalist dream.
Don’t hate me HN, but I say keep messing with the scroll bar, keep making annoying blinking banners, have your way with scroll fade.
Don’t listen to these web dev veterans, they are just like snobby movie critics!
They get hate because they are almost always annoying and distract from the actual content. Nobody cares how creative your web page design is if it sucks to use so badly that a plain text page would be better.
My favorite part of the iPhone 17 pro / ios26 combo is that it lags on any and everything that remotely touches the GPU like this website.
No stutter on iPhone 12 18.5
Next phone will be an android at this rate if Apple can’t solve this garbage
I can only add another aberration that it just started to happen on my browsers without even updating or doing anything at all: I get the master volume raised, I mean not the YouTube volume, but the volume that is reported in my OS.
I truly don't know how this is possible or how should I turn it off completely. There are some settings in Firefox but the ones I have tried do not work.
This is one of the worst things I have seen in many years, along with all the other aberrations that are already spread on the net.
Scrolling is broken by everyone everywhere.
Scrolling to the bottom then forcing me to click "show more"? Lazy. A truly horrible experience. I don't know how anyone could think that is a good idea. The worst offenders are the ones showing me products. You might as well not have pages of products at all. Just tell me these 12 are the only ones you have because I've already lost interest. Not that most web stores are any good - most have no useful ability to search or browse so finding anything is like digging through a junk drawer. It all screams "we hate selling product, please go away".
Next worst? Everything Google makes and all the fools who copied them: scroll down, scrolling hard stops, then a few seconds later the next segment of content loads. The scrollbar position is naught but lies. WHY??? Are you proud of that? Because you shouldn't be. You should be ashamed. Demand-load the content behind the scenes so scrolling is continuous and smooth. If the user scrolls fast then skip pages and/or cancel prior requests. The scrolling is the priority, lazy-load the content as needed... but for f*k sake don't do what Google does.
The top worst: hijacking scrolling for any form of animation or to change direction. Absolutely horrid and I leave any webpage that does this out of spite. This just screams "I'M A DESIGNER, LOOK AT MEEEEE!!!!!". It is code equivalent of being "too clever", but for UX. If you don't want people to buy your product or signup for your service but instead be impressed by your ability to vomit out D-E-S-I-G-N then by all means proceed. Everyone is guilty of this, even those who should know better.
I'll add having a floating header that covers the top portion of the page, and only appears when you scroll up. I like to read text in the top third of the page, then scroll down so the lines I'm reading are still in the top third of the page. With the height of my monitor that's the most comfortable position, this should usually be the case if following common ergonomic guidelines. If I scroll up, very often such a header will appear & cover the text I was trying to scroll up to read, so I have to scroll farther. Then it's visible, so I scroll down to move it back up to the top portion of the page as the header goes away. Lather, rinse, repeat, install a uBlock origin filter to get rid of floating headers.
What sucks with scroll fade is when it fades slower than one can read or scroll.
Fading the entire content very fast, so fast that it's barely perceptible is actually better on the eyes.
Blinking hurts. Fast changing contrast hurts. The fade is a natural effect I use everywhere almost. My eyes never complained, rather are grateful for the small effort it takes to get right
I've always been under the impression it was lazy loading the page to increase page loading times for content above the fold? At least this was why I started using it about 8 years ago.
Its like anything though. I think people just thought it was a cool effect and so it wasn't about page speed any more, it was just about something people used to add some panache to their sites.
Kind of like people who've been abusing modals for the last decade or so. lol
I'm not a web dev but if the goal is to improve load times, I'd think it would make more sense to load the full article text up front, and lazy load heavier data like images and video? I've seen a lot of websites that do it that way.
But then a fast reader might be able to read faster than the ads could load!
It's amazing how web graphic designers don't realize 99% of all added motion/animation is just as annoying and unnecessary as <blink> and <marquee>.
Oh they know, but it's requested because clients want a fancy website, and just having fucking text on the fucking screen explaining what you fucking sell is boooooring.
And also completely functional and accessible but where's the fun in that?
Yep. And then complain how it’s not loading/stuttering. I guess we need a new website…
I'm someone who loves over-the-top, creative-for-the-sake-of-creative web design, even for something primarily text-based like a blog post, I 100% sympathize with and want to accommodate those who don't.
I think `prefers-tacky` is a brilliant idea! It means excess decorative images could avoid even being downloaded if the user so chooses.
This is why I chose a fade-in reveal https://www.rgbjoy.com/
It’s kind of like when someone wants you to read something, so they hold the thing to read for you and read it out loud, while moving their finger at the words they’re currently reading. I know how to read!!!
I'm guilty of this as well. https://kraa.io/about has some fade-in animation for the intro text – driven by wanting the initial impression to be focused/minimal and 'unravel' as you go. I take it that most HN folks would vastly prefer to NOT have this?
I’ll say as someone who suffers from severe motion sickness and the OP site makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, that your site does the fade in fast enough that it doesn’t give me any discomfort. Seems fine to me. Maybe I should consider being a consultant for vestibular motion sickness accessibility, haha. I’d get paid to answer “on a scale of 1-10, how pukey does this app make you feel?”
I think it looks fine except it's missing a more obvious hint that there's more to see when I scroll. The one that's there is just textual and very delayed.
Not sure if I second this or not. I did want to scroll, but I don't know how much of that was influenced from the context or the extreme minimalism making me want to look for more - I'm interested in how I would have reacted to the site not knowing it had scroll fade. I could see an argument with the "Don't Make Me Think" principle.
I wish this blog stopped the scroll fading after it made ita point. would have really hammered it home.
Amen. So cathartic to see someone publish the post I've been wanting to write for a while, and with a much better title.
Also: I've noticed a new abuse recently of sites implementing scroll momentum on desktop — has anyone else seen this? I couldn't believe it, but there it was.
In reader mode on iOS 26, there is some scroll jank, presumably due to hidden scroll fade.
(Take this as another excuse not to hijack scrolling behavior, not an actual request you improve your implementation of tacky-mode.)
This terrible idea is a parody of a good idea from game design - LOD cross-fade. When a distant object changes from a low level of detail representation to a higher one, or vice versa, the change is best done as a cross fade. The old one fades out to transparent, the new one fades in from transparent.
This is done to hide the change, not as a creative effect. The human visual system is very sensitive to fast changes. But below half a second, smooth changes are not too noticeable. With this trick, plus a slight amount of distance haze, you can get away with quite low detail distant models. That's part of how GTA V does those long vistas efficiently.
Here's a long drive around the GTA V world.[1] Watch how background objects change. Many distant background objects start out with very low detail. Watch power line towers, for example, which are very low detail until about 100m range. The cross-fade to a better model takes about a half second. Active players don't notice.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws_yYxUaWRE
Really, almost any animation or hijacking on scrolling should be abolished. It's one of the most disgusting things to encounter on a webpage.
I don't want your product to spin while I scroll down. I don't want animations or boxes to start appearing or disappearing. I don't want helpful tooltips, popups, or "I hope you enjoyed this" notifications to appear as I scroll.
What I want when I scroll is for the page to move, either up or down, in a completely consistent manner. I want to be able to reasonably predict what I'll see as I go up or down.
Apple loves this shit. Fortunately they aren't AS BAD as they once were, but you'll still encounter it on their product pages.
https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/
My least favorite by far is the “multi section” webpage design. Where the page is split into multiple whole-screen sections and scrolling the mouse wheel alternates between either moving between sections or playing the animations of that section. Yes please make my scroll wheel only sometimes actually scroll the page and other times rotate a graphic for way too long thanks
Agree. I understand why people like those animations and sometimes even i want to implement these in my website with GSAP, but then i remember that these animations make my content harder to read.
Another major pisser is sites that deliberately disable zooming on their mobile incarnations. WTF, WHY? My favorite was when Google imperiously declared that it would "punish" "non-mobile-friendly" sites in their search results... but then disabled zooming on its own pages.
Originally read the URL as “D-Bus Hell dot com” and was like… yup.
Death to Scroll Bar size change!!!
As always with this stuff, it's only bad when you notice it. When it's done right you just think "That was a nicely designed page".
The HTML of that last paragraph sent me lmao
This website has a slow and laggy implementation which unfairly shows off the effect.
good read. thanks for sharing
do not the scroll
i will umatrix you
This is the modern day blinking HTML tag.
I also hate infinite scrolling.
I much prefer to have websites simple at all times. I understand that stylish means it must look good and elegant, but this often ends up annoying me to no ends. Without ublock origin I would go nuts. I use it more to get rid of HTML I don't want to see. All pop-ups and slide-ins for instance. These things should never ever happen. Any notification should happen differently, or not at all. Often it is "please donate to us" - I understand their use case, but how is this relevant to my use case?
There are no bad animations, only bad designs.
If you design the animation to be way over the top like this, and then design the page to use it on every line then of course it looks like shit.
This is like arguing against any amount of sugar in food and then shoveling it into someone's mouth to try to prove your point. It's disingenuous and you aren't proving anything. I don't even think the top agreeing comments here are coming from web devs or the target users.
Animations need to to serve a purpose.
Fading in is justifiable when you're adding new content on top of existing content, and need to draw attention to the fact that something changed in that part of the screen. None of that applies in the case of fade-in during scrolling. The user is already scrolling, everything on screen is moving, and new content is already expected to be coming in to view at the bottom of the window. Adding animations on top of all of that doesn't help anything, and just distracts from and delays presentation of the content the user was already trying to reveal.
If you sped this up, and minimized it to the point it was unnoticeable, it would not hurt the browsing experience.
But that raises the question...
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