Annoying HTML floating bar things

[kajabor]

I don't know what you call them, but you know those things that are showing up on all the websites, floating bars that don't go away when you scroll down? Sometimes they're toolbars, like on the new Gmail, sometimes they're just info links.

Anyway, they suck! I hate them! I'm scrolling down to get away from what's already on the page! If I want to get to the top of the page I'll hit the Home key!

So my question is: how do I block them? Surely they share some common piece of code that I can put in my adblock software? Yes?

Or do all you web developers love those things because you hate humanity?

[stormsweeper]

There's a few different implementation of them, so there's no universal way to kill them, sadly.

[kajabor]

Why are they there? They pretty much eliminate the usefulness of the "page down" key, since now paging down doesn't take you to the next block of text, as the top of the page is hidden by the floating bars, so you lose the next four lines of text that you wanted to read. They're usually useless (the Gmail one is particularly egregious: it hides buttons like "send" and "forward" that are commonly used in order to block them with some less-used buttons. And they seemed designed only for very large screens; on my laptop they just eat up too much screen real estate.

I know there are web developers here. Could you all use your combined might to eliminate these things?

[stormsweeper]

I'm generally against them. The usual answer is branding. Google, in particular, is having a crisis of identity right now. The official line is usually something along the lines of "we're making it more application-like" or similar BS.

I'll also note the Google one is poorly implemented - you can do the same effect with CSS in a way that the bar at least does not actually cover content. Notably that feature isn't well implemented in Android browsers or older versions of IE, which I guess is what they're handling.

[phredd]

Yeah, google's been transforming into a steaming pile this year, IME. It's especially bad on my little netbook.

[jenskot]

I don't know if this is still the case, but a few weeks ago when I turned off Javascript on G+, all I got was a white blank page. I love G+ and I love Javascript, but this was surprising for a company of Google's resources. That said, Facebook looked like it might work with no Javascript but there were random submit buttons that did nothing when you clicked on them.

[kajabor]

Yeah, google's been transforming into a steaming pile this year, IME. It's especially bad on my little netbook.

Totes. I'm not someone who usually complains about changes to a web page, app, etc., but these are showing up everywhere and to no good effect that I can discern. Like you said, it's especially bad on a small screen. The current MS Word has a similar problem with the "ribbon" eating up space, but at least you can hide that and it doesn't effect scrolling.

I'm really at a loss to explain the popularity of these things, except that people can do it so they do do it, kind of like blinking text on web pages in the late 90s. It's like the HTML coders have a new toy, so they just have to play with it.

[stormsweeper]

They're not even new toys. There was a smaller fad of this a few years back. Those tended to be smaller at least, but back then they weren't presuming 1920x1080+ monitors.

[stormsweeper]

I don't know if this is still the case, but a few weeks ago when I turned off Javascript on G+, all I got was a white blank page. I love G+ and I love Javascript, but this was surprising for a company of Google's resources. That said, Facebook looked like it might work with no Javascript but there were random submit buttons that did nothing when you clicked on them.

You really can't use any modern social site without JS. Facebook loads in some minimal HTML, but it's all JS driven.

It's one of the main reasons every browser touts JS speed these days. Try grabbing FF3.5 and hitting any of these sites.

[IngredientX]

I see it as the latest development in the long-standing* feud between thin clients and thick clients.

* in computing terms, at least.