

Ask HN:Pop-ups, previews, help bubbles, etc. - dan_the_welder

Quite simply all this popup stuff drives me insane. I am just trying to read or highlight for searching and boom, magically a popup appears. Often it will not even have a close button on it and wants to hang around until some arbitrary time out occurs, blocking what I am trying to read.
  I typically use the mouse to keep my place and often will rollover what I expect to be a link so I can see where it goes according to the status bar, where nothing appears since it's triggering a popup of some sort which is there to annoy me when I look back to where I left the mouse.
  At first it was just ads, which is irritating but not unexpected, and I just avoid those sites. However now we have these supposedly helpful ones that give us a preview window of the link.
  This just destroys the user experience for me and makes me never want to return to your page. Am I alone in my thinking here or is this the future of web design? I don't even want to use Ebay anymore because of this.
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alex_c
I think many tech blogs are the worst offenders, and go way overboard with
widgets and third party services. Take the front page of TechCrunch - it
weighs in at 508KB. Mashable gets to about 884KB before FireBug gives up in
disgust.

I can't really see this being sustainable in the long term.

~~~
dan_the_welder
I am so relieved and nostalgic when I land on a website that looks like it was
made in 1998.

Oh look....text, just what I wanted and there is the information I need.

Not that I am a total curmudgeon, lots of the new Railsey looking websites
have a clean design that is pleasing to the eye.

