

Stop Eating My Pixels - marknadal

Early on, it was just the cool design kids who would use fixed CSS positioning to stick some element to the viewport as you scrolled.<p>But then companies started picking up the trend and started attaching help buttons, review links, and chat support.<p>Then the widgets exploded, snap-on sharing options, mini status update bars...<p>Apparently, then, every big name company started feeling a little lackluster. News sites like TechCrunch jumped onboard, Facebook joined the party, and now even Gmail is spiff'n the new look.<p>No! This is my screen space! It is precious and valuable for vertical scrolling, my laptop is only 768 pixels tall, my netbook is only 600 pixels tall. I don't want your stupid fixed banner, especially when it is 80%+ deadspace of useless pixels.<p>I need these pixels to view what I want to look at!
Stop the trend. Stop the genocide of the pixels.
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hollerith
If there were a browser extension to block _all_ fixed elements from
displaying, I would install it.

ADDED. Here is a first draft of some text for the Kickstarter project: "The
extension would modify the Google Chrome browser so that no fixed-position CSS
elements would display. However, the extension must not prevent the display of
any elements that would have been displayed by an unmodified copy Firefox 2.0
with plugins (Flash, Sliverlight, etc) disabled."

ADDED. There are some sign-up forms, e.g., on Reddit that would probably be
rendered unreachable by this browser extension. So maybe it needs a whitelist.

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dfc
Easy: Adblock Plus and Adblock Select Element Hiding Helper

Point, click, block, done...

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spiralganglion
Not to mention that that fixed elements are just-plain broken in the Android
browser. They don't attach to the edges of the viewport (which would be bad
for the reasons you outlined) — they simply sit in whatever position they are
given when the page first renders (which is also bad because it often covers
content you'd like to see, or interact with).

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ricardobeat
Used to be like that on iOS. On iOS5 they attach to the viewport but zoom
"normally", destroying most sites where they're used.

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endian
<http://www.ghostery.com> helps fight third-party JS

