It’s kind of like when someone wants you to read something, so they hold the thing to read for you and read it out loud, while moving their finger at the words they’re currently reading. I know how to read!!!
The poster seems to be implying that this effect is prevalent across the web, yet i'm seeing it for the very first time on that post. (And, indeed, it's annoying. My eyes can't read when there's animation going on nearby.)
The goldfish animation along the bottom is epic and i will have to mine that bit for reuse somewhere :).
Real parallax is fine if done well. A subtle image parallax looks great on some websites. If you're talking about "move any random element at different speed without rhyme or reason," then yeah, I agree with you. We all hate it.
> This post purposefully ignores the reduced motion preference to give everyone the same truly terrible experience. I am sorry. Please use your browser’s reader mode.
"Reader Mode" shouldn't even be a special mode. It should just be the default browsing experience, and users who want all this styling crap should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something.
If you design the animation to be way over the top like this, and then design the page to use it on every line then of course it looks like shit.
This is like arguing against any amount of sugar in food and then shoveling it into someone's mouth to try to prove your point. It's disingenuous and you aren't proving anything. I don't even think the top agreeing comments here are coming from web devs or the target users.
Really, almost any animation or hijacking on scrolling should be abolished. It's one of the most disgusting things to encounter on a webpage.
I don't want your product to spin while I scroll down. I don't want animations or boxes to start appearing or disappearing. I don't want helpful tooltips, popups, or "I hope you enjoyed this" notifications to appear as I scroll.
What I want when I scroll is for the page to move, either up or down, in a completely consistent manner. I want to be able to reasonably predict what I'll see as I go up or down.
Apple loves this shit. Fortunately they aren't AS BAD as they once were, but you'll still encounter it on their product pages.
I'm guilty of this as well. https://kraa.io/about has some fade-in animation for the intro text – driven by wanting the initial impression to be focused/minimal and 'unravel' as you go. I take it that most HN folks would vastly prefer to NOT have this?
Hah, the point has certainly been made. Absolute Barf-o-Rama.
I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness, which hasn’t really improved as an adult, and this page immediately made me feel like I’m going to throw up. Had to switch to reader mode after the first image. I was always the kid who couldn’t read in the car, and was always groggy on long road trips because of Dramamine (side note, Meclizine has significantly improved my life, as it has largely the same effect without drowsiness). As an adult I’m fine as long as I’m in the front seat, public transit is terrible for me. Elevators are tiny torture chambers, especially when stopping on multiple floors. And it’s cumulative, the sensation becomes worse the more I’m exposed to it over the course of a day (I have a mental “theme park budget” in my head of how many rides I can comfortably do!). VR can’t have any motion that isn’t firmly anchored to a sense of place (space ship/driving sims are okay though!)
I’m glad awareness is being raised about this, but I’m curious what websites are using this now? Is it just personal blogs and the like right now? I definitely would have noticed this cropping up on websites I frequent.
I thought this was going to be about iOS and how now (as of iOS 26) there is a "fade out" at the top of every web page (around the notch/top-edge area).
When scrolling/reading a web page, it literally changes that section of the text so that it fades to gray.
So, "everything scroll fades".
I couldn't find a way to turn it off. Quite irritating, IMHO.
EDITED TO ADD ELABORATION: The issue with iOS "scroll fade" text color in Safari near the top notch is that this makes that top-edge-text "dynamic" (changing) and thus "draws attention" to it visually, thus competing for eyeball attention when I am probably actually reading somewhere further down on the page. Also, I would still like to be able to glance up to the topmost visible text if wanted, without having to adjust to its different and less visible colors. Apple designers should know all this. Further, I'd say the page text color should probably by default respect what the web page designer configured it as, and not have the OS change that text color (unless the user gets fancy and requests an override with dark mode or whatever settings).
This article's critique seems valid, too (more generically about "scroll fade" in interfaces, e.g. web pages, which seems to mostly be about items appearing gradually via motion). Personally, I see less of that these days, compared to making every page in an OS fade out where unnecessary.
Amen. So cathartic to see someone publish the post I've been wanting to write for a while, and with a much better title.
Also: I've noticed a new abuse recently of sites implementing scroll momentum on desktop — has anyone else seen this? I couldn't believe it, but there it was.
Sites overriding scroll behavior to implement their own smooth scroll behavior with the wrong speed has been a thing for many years. It's a bit harder to notice if you're using a traditional mouse wheel, but is really easy to notice on a decent laptop touchpad.
I've always been under the impression it was lazy loading the page to increase page loading times for content above the fold? At least this was why I started using it about 8 years ago.
Its like anything though. I think people just thought it was a cool effect and so it wasn't about page speed any more, it was just about something people used to add some panache to their sites.
Kind of like people who've been abusing modals for the last decade or so. lol
I'm someone who loves over-the-top, creative-for-the-sake-of-creative web design, even for something primarily text-based like a blog post, I 100% sympathize with and want to accommodate those who don't.
I think `prefers-tacky` is a brilliant idea! It means excess decorative images could avoid even being downloaded if the user so chooses.
I worked for a client who was all about scrolljacking. Then he discovered parallax effect, and there was no looking back. He fired me, and got another team who didn't have any opinions.
Now the page stutters on every device other than iPhone 16+ with 5G. :shrug:
71 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 84.0 ms ] threadThe goldfish animation along the bottom is epic and i will have to mine that bit for reuse somewhere :).
i will umatrix you
"Reader Mode" shouldn't even be a special mode. It should just be the default browsing experience, and users who want all this styling crap should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something.
If you design the animation to be way over the top like this, and then design the page to use it on every line then of course it looks like shit.
This is like arguing against any amount of sugar in food and then shoveling it into someone's mouth to try to prove your point. It's disingenuous and you aren't proving anything. I don't even think the top agreeing comments here are coming from web devs or the target users.
I don't want your product to spin while I scroll down. I don't want animations or boxes to start appearing or disappearing. I don't want helpful tooltips, popups, or "I hope you enjoyed this" notifications to appear as I scroll.
What I want when I scroll is for the page to move, either up or down, in a completely consistent manner. I want to be able to reasonably predict what I'll see as I go up or down.
Apple loves this shit. Fortunately they aren't AS BAD as they once were, but you'll still encounter it on their product pages.
https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/
It's not realistic, though. Illegible sites never get that detail right.
I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness, which hasn’t really improved as an adult, and this page immediately made me feel like I’m going to throw up. Had to switch to reader mode after the first image. I was always the kid who couldn’t read in the car, and was always groggy on long road trips because of Dramamine (side note, Meclizine has significantly improved my life, as it has largely the same effect without drowsiness). As an adult I’m fine as long as I’m in the front seat, public transit is terrible for me. Elevators are tiny torture chambers, especially when stopping on multiple floors. And it’s cumulative, the sensation becomes worse the more I’m exposed to it over the course of a day (I have a mental “theme park budget” in my head of how many rides I can comfortably do!). VR can’t have any motion that isn’t firmly anchored to a sense of place (space ship/driving sims are okay though!)
I’m glad awareness is being raised about this, but I’m curious what websites are using this now? Is it just personal blogs and the like right now? I definitely would have noticed this cropping up on websites I frequent.
When scrolling/reading a web page, it literally changes that section of the text so that it fades to gray.
So, "everything scroll fades".
I couldn't find a way to turn it off. Quite irritating, IMHO.
EDITED TO ADD ELABORATION: The issue with iOS "scroll fade" text color in Safari near the top notch is that this makes that top-edge-text "dynamic" (changing) and thus "draws attention" to it visually, thus competing for eyeball attention when I am probably actually reading somewhere further down on the page. Also, I would still like to be able to glance up to the topmost visible text if wanted, without having to adjust to its different and less visible colors. Apple designers should know all this. Further, I'd say the page text color should probably by default respect what the web page designer configured it as, and not have the OS change that text color (unless the user gets fancy and requests an override with dark mode or whatever settings).
This article's critique seems valid, too (more generically about "scroll fade" in interfaces, e.g. web pages, which seems to mostly be about items appearing gradually via motion). Personally, I see less of that these days, compared to making every page in an OS fade out where unnecessary.
Also: I've noticed a new abuse recently of sites implementing scroll momentum on desktop — has anyone else seen this? I couldn't believe it, but there it was.
It's a inexcusable usability disaster.
Its like anything though. I think people just thought it was a cool effect and so it wasn't about page speed any more, it was just about something people used to add some panache to their sites.
Kind of like people who've been abusing modals for the last decade or so. lol
(Take this as another excuse not to hijack scrolling behavior, not an actual request you improve your implementation of tacky-mode.)
I think `prefers-tacky` is a brilliant idea! It means excess decorative images could avoid even being downloaded if the user so chooses.
Now the page stutters on every device other than iPhone 16+ with 5G. :shrug: