Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Death to Scroll Fade

dbushell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 232 posts

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#71

Post by MoonWalk »

ryandrake wrote: post #11

> 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.

"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.

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#73

Post by nottorp »

jerlam wrote: post #56
realityfactchex wrote: post #50

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 co…

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.

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?

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#74

Post by MoonWalk »

SoftTalker wrote: post #68
ayhanfuat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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.

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#75

Post by hedora »

jerlam wrote: post #56
realityfactchex wrote: post #50

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 co…

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.

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#76

Post by MoonWalk »

knorker wrote: post #25
jonas21 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 work…

"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.

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#77

Post by knorker »

arcfour wrote: post #69
knorker wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 work…

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 und…

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?

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#78

Post by burningChrome »

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

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#79

Post by talim »

jonas21 wrote: post #64
troupo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#80

Post by hedora »

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.)

Post reply on HN