Deth

Fitness and everything else

Double Bad Websites

This morning I was looking at hacker news like I do every morning while I drink my coffee. I always find interesting reads there. The users of that site tend to weed out the crappy SEO-driven fluff websites and keep only the interesting website upvoted.

One of the links that I clicked on this morning had one of those sticky headers that aren’t easy to get rid of. That useless header took up two thirds of the screen, leaving me with a small window to try to read the actual article in.

Not only was the header annoying and pointless, but it also included an autoplay video. The video was of some TV news people who really just stand there and try to hype shit up these days. Even though it would autoplay, but it did play muted, so it was just wasting bandwidth. I guess it’s a good thing that it was muted, so no getting startled by unexpected sounds, but what was the point of it? My guess would be the designers or probably management saw something similar someplace and thought that’s what people want.

I remembered that I wanted to search for a Firefox add-on to get rid of those sticky elements, so I searched and found the Kill Sticky. It at least so far seems to work well enough. I had been using a bookmarklet, but that gets buried in the menu, so I went down the add-on route. One of the greatest features ever added to browsers right here.