
Ask HN: What is going on with mainstream website usability? - optimusclimb
I don&#x27;t keep a blog, so posting this here.<p>Over the past two years or so, I&#x27;ve noticed that the <i>basic</i> usability of most of the mainstream websites I either try to read myself, or see linked by others, has massively deteriorated.<p>I&#x27;m not referring to making things screen reader friendly, or the UI&#x2F;UX principles behind the navigation panels, etc. - I&#x27;m referring to the ability to scroll and read the content.<p>Admittedly I do a lot of browsing on an iPhone 6. No, not the most recent bleeding edge mobile tech, but still quite a fast &quot;machine&quot; to fit in one&#x27;s pocket. Surely it should be able to handle reading an article, no?<p>Yet time and time again, between the ads loading one on top of the other, trying to hit a little &quot;X&quot; button that moves out of the way as I try to tap it (because some other ad has either loaded or decided to resize itself), I&#x27;ll find myself scrolling and getting major lag - or the whole screen going blank and then refreshing, etc, etc.<p>The meat of my question is - are the engineers, product managers, and even top level business people that run these web sites even trying to use their finished product? Feel free to chime in if my anecdotal data is way off base, but I&#x27;m amazed the average person even makes it more than 1&#x2F;3rd of the way through a typical page before giving up and moving on. How is this a net positive for the businesses, even with the advertising revenue? Are the engineers of these sites just constantly not being given time to fix such issues, or being over-ruled on poor decisions?<p>Sure, sites such as HN work just fine - however I feel like we (as engineers at the least) have failed that something as simple as reading static content should work so poorly given the power of modern devices.
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techthroway443
You guys know what would be really cool? An adblock plugin that worked on page
popups (not on the ads, just the shit that takes up your screen asking for
your email or other random thing)

This wouldn't help you on your phone but at least if you were in front of a
computer maybe it wouldn't be as bad.

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alistproducer2
I keep JavaScript turned off on my phone for this very reason. A lot of sites
are almost unusable because of how long they take to load or the performance
once they do. I have about 15 sites on my exception list but other than those
if I can't read content on a site without JavaScript on, I just go somewhere
else.

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tchaffee
I'll add my anecdotal data point to yours. The experience has deteriorated to
the point that I am afraid to click on anything on a site that has a lot of
adverts. Or at least I wait quite a bit to wait for the layout to stabilize. I
do move on often if it is too annoying.

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PeterHK
not even mentioned the amounts of data needed to read simple articles.. I also
have JS turned off on my phone and just close websites that not load without
JS, i also disabled image loading in chrome settings but for some reason they
still load :(

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le-mark
I hypogthesize that has to do with whether the image is from an image tag or
from a css background image attribute. Does anyone reading this know for sure?

