webpage design becoming increasingly annoying?

Status
Not open for further replies.

intzor

Distinguished
Jan 17, 2009
85
0
18,640
I guess there must be some consensus among web developers about how web pages should work, but there are things happening in web design which I have tried to ignore but which I am finding more and more annoying. It seems to have gotten particularly bad in past two or three years. Is there no escape?


The main thing is pop ups. I remember from the very earliest days of the internet there were pop up advertisements, and there were also pop up blockers that took care of them. But now it seems as if websites are being designed in such a way that there is some new kind of pop up that simply cannot be blocked - a whole host of things that pop up and there is no way to circumvent them. pop up blockers cannot block these things because I have blockers enabled to no avail. Sometimes there are registration or sign up windows that pop up, and sometimes the windows cannot be closed and won't even let you view the page without signing up. Sometimes I see little social media things float up from some corner of the screen and sit there. This is especially annoying when I am using my iPad. Sometimes in attempting to close the pop up windows I hit something else and end up getting linked somewhere I didn't want to go. I end up spending a lot more time than I want to caught up in trying to disentangle myself from stuff I had no interest appearing on my screen in the first place.

Aren't web pages these days a lot more bloated than they need to be? I can't even load pages anymore on my old iPod Touch and I know this is directly a result of how bloated the pages are. They just cause safari to crash on that older device.

The other thing I've noticed more and more is that instead of displaying information in an easy to read format on a single page, websites now force you to constantly click through to page after page -- you have to keep loading page after page just to read a single article, or see a few pictures.

It seems like from the standpoint of convenience and usability the internet is not improving but getting dramatically worse. Also the user seems to have less and less control over his web experience. I have never seen any option for a "simpler" layout on any website and the things that used to work like the pop up blockers in web browsers, seem totally ineffective - and I have not been able to find any new type of blocker capable of dealing with these new annoyances.

I know there is probably no way to change these things on the user end since they are just th way web pages are being built now, but I still thought I'd make a post in hopes of getting some input from people who may have more insight into why this has happened and if there is anything we can do on the user end to try and "moderate" some of these effects. thanks in advance to all who join the discussion.
 
A lot of websites are paid for by advertising, so probably as we do more to avoid the ads, the websites do more to prevent the ads from being bypassed. However, I find the AdBlock Plus plugin for Firefox to be fairly effective, especially with some filter subscriptions.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.