Bad/bloated web design

[MrMobodies]

I see Sky news and Sky started doing this with a massive big banner thing that flashes on page load:
https://www.sky.com/

26% cpu usage/spike on this stupidity.

sky.com##.sc-jtMbrs.jBnagh
sky.com##[data-test-id="generic-hero-loading"]

Instead of that large horrible flashing thing the banner now jumps gradually.

I think I prefer that than having something slow everything else down and flash in my face.

[PlainName]

The Register, a once popular computer technical news site, has just 'refreshed' things and made it unusable if you have a phone - the body text is a tiny font and cannot be increased in size even if you use the browser's text sizing features (works on headlines you don't need to read, not on the body text you do).

If the blighters would just use good ole HTML instead of all this flashy web3 shit the stuff would be not only easily readable but would reflow when zoomed in (or out!) too.

[Ranayna]

Hmm, can't confirm that. The Register works fine for me on iOS. I am tempted to say that in horizontal mode, the text is even too large to easily read it.
On the desktop though... Ugh, the new layout looks bad on the desktop.

[PlainName]

Seems to be the text is fixed as if it were an image (that is, no reflow and must appear exactly as created), then it's zoomed to fit the display window. So on a phone in portrait mode it is tiny, but in landscape it is almost too big!

Letterbox is not the best or preferred way to read text. Newspapers use, and have nearly always used, columns for good reason.

On a PC it reflows but has a maximum width. Perversely, using a phone in portrait mode and electing to use the desktop site gives text even tinier than tiny, but it's surrounded by lots of white space and one can then zoom in so the white space is gone and then the text is a readable size. But far too much work for each page.

[Ranayna]

This is how The Registers text look like on iPhone.
Looks fine for me.

[MrMobodies]

The spammy toolbar that distracts me and in the way of the contents isn't fine for me.




The text isn't a problem for me as long as I can read it without those annoying things in the way bloating my view of the contents and screaming for more attention like the red colour of that fixed header.

[PlainName]

This is how The Registers text look like on iPhone.
Looks fine for me.

Yes, and...?

See my two screenies. Exactly the same text regardless of orientation or screen size and width. As I say, in portrait mode it is too small for me to read. You might have a BFO phone or microscope for eyes, but in my case it is too small to read comfortably.

In contrast, see the screenie from The Guardian, which in this case is just slightly larger text. But, importantly, I can set the text size in my browser and this text will reflect that. With The Register nothing can alter the size of the text <-- this is the issue I am complaining about.

Edit: Not obvious from the screenies because the forum makes them the same width. But FYI the portrait is about 70mm wide and the landscape 150mm. So the landscape text is twice as big.

[ethernet]

A very browned off internet security specialist was laid off. He got into using AI to deconstruct FIVE layers of obscured  compressed webpages to discover the company was lying and collecting full urls from apps in the Android appstore (That is not allowed) but did say that they logged urls in their privacy policy elsewhere. Not sure where to begin, playstore unable to do its job, or that people go to extremes to steal/otherwise take url's with 5 layers of behind your back code. All I know is that there is in money in substituting URL's like the app Honey did.

[PlainName]

Pardon me for being dim, but URLs to what?

[onsenwombat]

Sites you browse for free (aside from yielding whatever personal data they fish out & ad revenues) I can somewhat tolerate crap design, but holy hell does it get my blood boiling when absolutely dogshit amateur/troll level bullshit is incorporated in commercial stuff, like whatever junk your company has decided to use for this or that. Sites with back-ends slower than a floppy drive coated with no fucking possibility to go back or directly to the page you were looking for other than starting all over again, sessions that time out in 10 seconds (and of course, you'll be then starting over again from the landing page and navigate your way through the turtle mode shit-maze), all rendered out by some atrocity that gives you vibes from windows 95 or the likes. And not to forget the so-called search feature that's worse than the likely pre-alpha of Altavista.

[PlainName]

An app can't see another app's traffic, can it? So how would it capture URLs from the other apps?

[MrMobodies]

Trying to use Stylish or Stylus to hide the lightbox/fallback dimming overlay thing so the background remains white or the same when a dialogue opens.
https://ir.ebaystatic.com/rs/c/r1vinode/vendor-ebayui-core-Brh6QPwl.css

.lightbox-dialog[role="dialog"] {
    align-items: flex-start;
    /* background-color: var(--dialog-scrim-color-show) !important; */
    inset: 0 !important;
    justify-content: center;
    position: fixed !important;
    will-change: background-color;
    z-index: 100000 !important;
}

Very annoyed to find this.


No! I will not create and account and sign in.
It would have been useful to know this BEFORE the installation where I wouldn't have bothered.

It doesn't seem to do that on the Firefox extension.