John Gruber, on the seemingly omnipresent, floating share bars and “Open in App” buttons that are ruining the mobile web:

I’m sure “engagement” does register higher with these sharing dickbars, but I suspect a big part of that is because of accidental taps. And even so, what is more important, readability or “engagement”? Medium wants to be about readability but that’s hard to square with this dickbar, and especially hard to square with the “Open in App” button floating above it. […]

A website should not fight the browser. Let the browser provide the chrome, and simply provide the content. Web developers know this is right — these dickbars are being rammed down their throats by SEO experts. The SEO folks are the same dopes who came up with the genius strategy of requiring 5-10 megabytes of privacy-intrusive CPU-intensive JavaScript on every page load that slows down websites. Now they come to their teams and say, “Our pages are too slow — we gotta move to AMP so our pages load fast.”

The only thing I hate more than websites that hijack my scrolling are websites that ruin my browsing experience with floating navigation and sharing bars. I’m starting to wonder if I should just turn off JavaScript in all my browsers. Of course, this isn’t a very good idea, but I could always use Gruber’s old Flash workaround for site’s that don’t function without JavaScript. But that won’t help me when I’m using iOS, which is where I do most of my web browsing.