I just wanted to take a moment to enjoy how clean the web can be
I happened to click a link that took me to the associated twitterX account for something I was interested in and was greeted by not one, not two, but four modern day web popups.
I know it's nothing new. I've got a couple of firefox plugins that are usually quite good at hiding this sort of nonsense, but I guess they failed me today (or, I shudder to think, there were even more that were blocked, and this is what got through)
What's the worst new/not-signed-in user experience you've encountered recently?
This kind of thing getting worse and worse at all levels of tech is increasingly pushing me to the fringes of tech solutions (with all of the handicaps that come with that) as those are getting to be the only places where this kind of thing is not pervasive.
No apps on phone, if the mobile site doesn't work it can wait until I am in front of a desktop/laptop
No NFC payments as that requires the phone to be blessed by lord Google or father Apple
No set top streaming boxes on the TV, just a small Linux powered PC and a cheap Logitech wireless keyboard/trackpad
Google and YouTube are pretty fucking bad without an ad-blocker installed. From someone who has worked in jobs where I may as well have called myself a 'Professional Googler' and where I do not have permissions to install an ad-blocker on my work computer, the amount of ads I get buried with really sours the experience.
Also, a lot of news sites (particularly anything owned by Reach PLC such as the Mirror) are now flipping the middle-finger at GDPR by forcing users to pay to reject tracking cookies. Here's a screengrab from the Daily Mirror website...
The corporates keep finding ways to reintroduce the same shitty popup ads from the 90s to defeat whatever's been put in place to keep it from happening. Absolutely no sense of nuance. It's not the specific delivery mechanism users dislike, it's the whole terrible UX pattern. Stop trying to make me do shit that's not what I'm trying to do!
I set 2 different people up with revanced over the weekend. I thought I'd typed in the wrong URL because I'm on Firefox mobile and both of them are on Chrome mobile. Literally looks like an entirely different site. On Chrome it's got a big fancy logo at the top, ads....fucking....everywhere...
On Firefox(with various blockers and anti trackers etc etc) it's a plain white page with a bold title and small blurb then links to the various apks. Took me a minute to even figure out where the link for the manager was.....
I can just tell that whenever Twitter's user interface has weak attempts at humour, it was put there during the previous ownership, and that just makes me sad.
Like when you delete your account the final message says "#Goodbye", I was tearing up, thinking, like, shit, Musk really fucked everything up, did he?
I will say that the Google Auth prompt in particular is just this huge nuisance and a horrible experience. People should feel stupid for including it in their web experience.
A porn site a friend of mine sometimes visits pops up a "sign in with Google" banner when you visit without annoyance blocker, and a "like this on Facebook" when you open a video.
It's sad, for sure. What they really need is something that ties all of these pop-ups together. I, for one, think an AskJeeves browser extension would do the trick.
It's kind of bothersome how almost blind I am to them now. I habitually find a way to close them without having to read or focus my eyes on anything. That's not to say it isn't still an annoyance.
I've become quite picky about what sites I visit because of this, and it's why I don't like opening links. I know you can block this crap, but it's seldom worth the effort.