Diggles B.
Molly Whitei am so over the web design trend where every piece of text on the page has to animate in
web devs spent years agonizing over time to FCP only to now make people wait for their unnecessary animation to finish before visitors can actually read anything
Neia masks@molly0xfff Yeah, I use uMatrix to prevent sites from using CSS or javascript — originally when every site decided we only needed text weight to be at homeopathic levels and ultra low contrast, but I've managed to mostly escape this drek.
It's terrible.
It's terrible.
Vertana@molly0xfff It does cut down on animations, so there can be a perceived performance increase.
@vertana this is the site with prefers-reduced-motion. a responsible web dev would eliminate the unnecessary animations IMO
@molly0xfff Wow. I don’t think I’ve actually seen a website respond to the reduced motion setting from the OS. This looks (and probably feels) much better with reduced motion.
Christian Kent 𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥@molly0xfff @vertana I wouldn't mind this as the default, and (what you ask) no motion for the preference as set.
TBH there's some far farrrr worse stuff out there that bothers me 20x as much. Anything that reflows while I'm reading it — because a banner reloaded at the top with different sizes — or pretty much anything that delays the moment I can begin reading, just to load data.
Those sorts of things are "does not work as designed" whereas the OP is pointing out things that are annoying when working as designed. Two separate fights.
Greg Brooks@molly0xfff I was going to respond with that site that is super fast with no javascript ~”this site is really f’ing fast”, but web search is so completely broken today that I can’t find it.
Stephan Eggermont
Johan Sköld@rhoot @molly0xfff that’s it! Thanks
MHLoppy (has moved!)@keyboardg I think you're talking about these:
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/
(which I was beaten to :( )
Yrjänä Rankka 🌻@keyboardg @molly0xfff Yes a year or two ago I almost lost my lunch when I saw someone wrote about that ”new” fancy thing called ”server-side rendering.”
Made in DNATho, I gotta admit, be cool if all corpos switched over to GeoCities and late 90s design.
2xfo@molly0xfff
"Minimalistic by design"
I don't think that word means what they think it means
Unabogie has voted Kamala!@molly0xfff wait 'til you try to find the actual recipe on a recipe page and slog through an endless story about Tuscan summers ;-)
zenspider
@zenspider @molly0xfff but then how will I learn about summers in Tuscany?
HerrHerrmann
Tim Lavoie@zenspider @unabogie @molly0xfff There's also the Paprika app on iOS that does very well at this. Handy for all the good-looking recipes that family send to me via (uugh) Pinterest.
FanCityKnits 🇺🇦🧶That's what https://cooked.wiki/ is there for.
Yes, I know they probably need the adds to finance the free recipe site. But if they go that overboard - no
Cryptomon
Justin ⏚@molly0xfff Screw your SEO content, I want HEO (human eyeball optimized) content!
The Other Brook@molly0xfff Back in the beforetime we called that Flash Abuse and every site had a "skip intro" button.
John Autry
Ethan Marcotte@molly0xfff molly i appreciate you
and *yes* https://follow.ethanmarcotte.com/@beep/110022616524644135
Ethan Marcotte (@[email protected])
okay i love you all but by my math we’ve had a few years of animating in Every Single Block Of Content as the user scrolls down a web page, idk let’s maybe take a minute and look over the data
@beep 
a year later and it's only gotten worse
a year later and it's only gotten worse
Phil Giammattei@molly0xfff @beep it feels very much like a signal for “we spent a lot of money on this site” without conferring any user benefit whatsoever
@molly0xfff the internet’s tagline, right there 😭
Jamie McCarthy@beep @molly0xfff Months ago I started responding by scrolling to page bottom and back up, to get all its animation out of its system. Sometimes this even works
@jamiemccarthy oh no jamie
it meeeeeeee
Jerome (He/Him)@beep @molly0xfff I made every single element on a PowerPoint animate for an 8th grade presentation. This is giving the same energy.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)@jeromechoo @beep @molly0xfff Back in the ‘90s, PowerPoint had an export to web function, which used a load of IE-only extensions to support all of the animations. As a result, IE could do any animation that PowerPoint could do.
I discovered this when ordering from a local pizza place at a friend’s house. He was the only person I knew still using IE and it turned out that what I’d thought was a fairly simple site (with a gratuitous number of background images) had weird transitions on every click. Looking at the page source, we found all of the non-standard CSS bits.
On the one hand, it’s nice that web standards have caught up with proprietary extensions. On the other hand, those extensions were an abomination unto Nuggan.
Stuart Langridge@molly0xfff everyone who builds a website where all the text slowly slides and fades into place will be punished by having their phone’s home screen do the same thing for a week, or until they throw it out of the window, whichever comes first
Philipp Kruse@molly0xfff My theory is still that the proliferation of Wordpress and its commercial theme ecosystem has been a primary driver of this trend. But yeah, it’s gotten pretty ridiculous.
Rhys Jones@sphire @molly0xfff This is definitely what I’m noticing. I’m currently going through the process of evaluating Wordpress as an option for the company I work for and their aging Wordpress site. The majority of themes heavily focus on animating content all over the place, I guess that sells? I know the marketing department loves them. I think I’m just going to give up on Wordpress however and build the site in Astro and use Builder as the CMS. Oh and no animations.
IslandUsurper 
@molly0xfff surely not the same web devs, right? Right?! 
Oggie@molly0xfff God yes.
It was a constant, heavy thing of how much needs to load before the page is usable. And can we slim that down.
If you disable script stuff, most webpages now just completely brick. And they really don't fucking have to. If you want to do a simplistic aesthetic, do it! You can even be clever with click maps if you hate users that much, but stop with this animation that leaves me confused if my adblocker broke your shitty page, or 'stylized'.
Interpipes 💙@molly0xfff god yes
We took over the hosting for an organisation, and one of the “performance optimisations” I deployed for them was quartering the fade in time of their page.
Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud@molly0xfff You're not alone. I say bring back animated 🔥s!!!
🐈⬛David Sommerseth@WildEyedBoyFromFreecloud @molly0xfff
What did you expect when the 'marquee' tag got deprecated in HTML5 ....
David Bloom@molly0xfff think of how many watt-hours of CPU/GPU energy on battery are being wasted worldwide to make web pages harder to read…
Cal Moody@molly0xfff I can only hope that in a few years we’ll all look back on this trend like we do on PowerPoint slides where every bullet point swooshes in ➰
@logicalmoody i can only hope it's not a matter of years 😭
IvanDSM@molly0xfff @logicalmoody Web Devs have been working on these pointless endeavours for over a decade now, I don't see it getting better anytime soon unfortunately. But hey, whatever runs fast on their top tier rigs is good to ship, right?
JESSE JANOWIAK HAS MOVED@IvanDSM @molly0xfff @logicalmoody Hey, don’t put all the blame on the devs. The clients and designers are the ones putting it in the spec.
@wonkeythemonkey @molly0xfff @logicalmoody Fair enough, sorry for the generalisation. I guess I scapegoated my frustrations as of late with badly-written websites (somehow 3 big sale platforms in Brazil all broke image uploading on Firefox) and my overall frustration with privileged devs who assume everyone's rig is top tier onto the group of web developers as a whole. Not cool, my bad.
@molly0xfff this is such a “once you see it” thing and I wish I had never noticed it because now it just makes me mad every time
ben@molly0xfff Wow yeah I hate that.
Also sites that override scrolling to do some weird animation almost never should be doing so. (Which I guess is the same 'feature’ actually?)
cuan_knaggs@molly0xfff but the management team thinks it looks so cool and modern
Tinyrabbit ✅@mensrea @molly0xfff This. Not even a joke. ”Our website needs a more modern look” is an argument I’ve heard time and time again
Rick
Andres@molly0xfff I love the animations.
Mostly because I can immediately see which companies prefer flashy bullshit over actual usability, and avoid their products/services.
Jon Mitchell@molly0xfff I like (hate) how this website says it is “minimalistic by design”
Juan C Nuno@molly0xfff Yep. I sometimes long for Web 1.0. Give me straightup HTML. No CSS. The default styling. No JavaScript. Walls of text.
Jared White (ResistanceNet ✊)@molly0xfff It sucks so bad.
Patrick Johanneson 🚀 🇨🇦@molly0xfff "Minimalistic by design" #NoItAint
Poligofsky@molly0xfff I blame Core Animation (Apple technology invented for iPhone OS). Fancy and easy-to-use APIs for giving every UI element frivolous slow behaviours, when all you want is to get on with it.
Edit: I mean, this explosion of animations was the inspiration for similar behaviours everywhere. Though it may have been destiny.
With the sheer irony that every major operating system out there and program is flat as a pancake.
Mac OS seems to have changed very little in the last 20 years...
Relative to its counterparts...
Shame IOS was / is a mess