Okay, I totally get that companies hosting websites need to make money in order to provide the website service. No problem. They do news, or weather, or whatever, and that takes money to run just like anything else.
But has anyone else noticed the (fairly new?) "website wiggle", where when you go to a website it seems that someone has included an algorithm to ensure that the page does this annoying up/down wiggle, apparently to ensure that when you click on something of interest it jumps at just the right time to ensure your click lands on an ad?
I'm curious what that algorithm looks like. Yeah it's hidden under the natural loading of images and ads and stuff, but it's getting so that I can't click on anything of interest without the page jiggling so that my click hits an ad.
I've pretty much given up on most news websites, other than to check the front page headlines. And weather websites have become all about making sure you click on an ad, and all of these OMG THE SKY IS FALLING forecasts that rarely come true.
Anyone remember when TV ads were nice and predictable and you could get up and grab something to eat?
In any case, I'd be interested to see if anyone knows what they add to their code to make this happen.
Honestly, I don’t think it’s deliberate. I observe it when I click on something
before the page has finished loading. My suspicion is that some script is waiting on something to load, and that the half-finished script does something with the document length or position. Then, when you click, the browser aborts the script, causing the position change from the script to be discarded. So then the content scoots around, and then the click is processed.
It’s absolutely maddening.
If a page isn’t fully loaded, I try to remember to stop the page loading first, so that it’ll settle down before I click.
I also suspect this behavior is related to something else that’s been driving me up the wall lately: “back” is broken on so many sites. Not that it doesn’t take me to the right page, but that it forgets where I was on the page and takes me back to the top of the page. (And this is without endless scrolling/dynamic loading, which ironically
can support “back” very well if effort is made. Twitter is a fantastic example of “back” working well, even with endless scrolling: you always end up precisely where you were before, including page position. Facebook is a perfect example of how it
shouldn’t work, as your timeline will
never go back to where it was.) But the fact that even pages with no or minimal scripting and dynamic whatnots now often “back” to the top of the page makes me think that many factors are at play, from browser behaviors, to how browser caches work, to how the servers signal whether a page is stale or not.