DIE, SNAP! DIE!!
An update or so ago LiveJournal made (yet another) boneheaded move and added a misfeature from snap.com that does nothing but get in the way. I have yet to see anyone besides the folks making the announcement claim this was a good idea. But, it can be turned off. In a disappointingly limited way. I can, and have, set the "never show this on MY ( Read more... )
Comments 11
(The comment has been removed)
SnapSh*t takes what would be a nice normal link and screws it up by changing it so that when you put the pointer over it a subwindow pops up showing a preview of the link. This gets in the way, chews up machine cycles and bandwidth, and lets trolls have fun with goatse type links. Even with plug-ins turned off (as snapsh*t depends on Flash) I still can see a big blot on a page with the thing. What happens is that the page loads like normal, then just as I can start to read it it's like it reloads and the content is shoved down below the edge of the browser window so reason I'm looking at the page goes away. And on top is this blot from snap.com like one of those sub-windows, only without content, and there are a few links, none of which are actually useful and the one that would be useful (to turn it off) doesn't work.
Reply
(The comment has been removed)
Almost nobody has. I think it's a toy for the MySpace crowd. Slashdot had a problem with trolls that put links in comments, links that looked like they might be useful or interesting but just went to goatse. Their solution was to change how links looked in comments. Instead of, "Try Google." Which is misleading (the link really goes to Yahoo) they looked like this: "Try Google [www.yahoo.com]." And if that bothered you, you could turn the feature off for your account so that you wouldn't see [stuff in brackets] if you didn't want to.
What Slashdot did was the opposite of what LJ did in many ways. It made life harder for trolls. It didn't chew up significant bandwidth or machine cycles (hey, my laptop is a PII-266, every cycle matters!) and the control did the right thing.
Reply
(The comment has been removed)
That, or close, was what I wound up doing. It still bugs me that I had to resort to that rather simply set one global control on LJ, but LJ thoughtlessly did not provide the proper control.
Reply
Reply
After years and years of people trying to shut off things that pop up, materialize, fly across the screen, flash madly, or otherwise disturb the browsing experience... why the CRAP would anyone think introducing new technologies to do the same thing would be a GOOD idea?
Recall the Animaniacs segments GOOD IDEA/BAD IDEA? This is similar: GOOD IDEA / MARKETING IDEA. I generally keep javascript off just because of crap like this. There are a (very) few sites I do allow javascript. "But you're missing the full web experience!" Yep, I'm missing having every loudmouth carnival barker distracting me as they hawk their rigged games and cheap junk.
Reply
Reply
I can set site preferences for the place that use scripting in a useful way, so that's what I do. And it's fairly simple for me to switch scripting on and off. I love the control I have with Opera.
Graceful degradation is a concern. Sometimes JS is required, but those times are not as often as it is used, alas.
Reply
Leave a comment