Death to Scroll Fade

https://dbushell.com/2026/01/09/death-to-scroll-fade/

by PaulHoule • 4 months ago

412 210 4 months ago

hyperhello• 4 months ago

It’s kind of like when someone wants you to read something, so they hold the thing to read for you and read it out loud, while moving their finger at the words they’re currently reading. I know how to read!!!

sgbeal2• 4 months ago

The poster seems to be implying that this effect is prevalent across the web, yet i'm seeing it for the very first time on that post. (And, indeed, it's annoying. My eyes can't read when there's animation going on nearby.)

The goldfish animation along the bottom is epic and i will have to mine that bit for reuse somewhere :).

ramon156• 4 months ago

I was redesigning a website of mine and Claude suggested to add this as an animation. My theory is that, if claude is confident in a suggestion, a lot of other people have done the same.

Maybe it's too subtle to notice.

Edit: on odeva.nl

chrismorgan2• 4 months ago

The scroll fade on that site is comparatively inoffensive (comparatively), because you messed with scrolling itself, which is one of the worst things you can do, taking over and ruining inertia. You’re literally going out of your way to make things worse. The ONLY time scrolljacking of any kind is acceptable is for things like maps where there is no “normal”.

Xerox9213• 4 months ago

https://history-of-animation.webflow.io/

DrewADesign• 4 months ago

I’ve seen the mostly in personal website templates used by people that would have had very sparkly MySpace profiles had they been creating for the web back then.

Sohcahtoa82• 4 months ago

The poster seems to be implying that this effect is prevalent across the web

Because it is.

For sites with dynamic content (social media, news, etc.), it doesn't happen.

But commercial sites trying to convince you to use their product, they're incredibly common. It's not always a fade in exactly like this site does it. Sometimes it's content sliding in from the side.

It's incredibly pervasive on SaaS marketing pages.

sgbeal2• 4 months ago

It's incredibly pervasive on SaaS marketing pages.

That would explain my ignorance of it - such sites are in the bottom negligible percentage of sites which i might accidentally visit but never purposely do.

jonas212• 4 months ago

You probably haven't noticed it before because when it's done well, it's a subtle and pleasant effect that can be used to draw your attention to particular elements on the page.

This site is intentionally doing it very poorly to make a point. Really, the takeaway should be don't do things poorly. But that's kind of obvious.

JohnFen• 4 months ago

when it's done well, it's a subtle and pleasant effect

I've seen it quite a lot, but apparently I've never seen it done well. It's a very annoying effect that chases me away from the site using it.

knorker4• 4 months ago

when it's done well

It's always awful. This site is exagerated in degree, but in kind it's merely on the scale of awful.

Computers should not waste my time. Even if eyes are 10ms faster than the awful fade, if a million people see it, that's almost three hours of human life down the drain.

And when scrolling fast, or far, it's not uncommon to have it waste a second of human time. A million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".

It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time.

The web is already slow. No need to deliberately spend effort to make it even slower.

marssaxman2• 4 months ago

Not doing it at all would be better still. It's really annoying.

troupo• 4 months ago

Fade in in scroll will always be slower than the reading speed of a significant percentage of population.

This becomes worse for people who just skim content, re-read the text, or want to quickly scroll to a specific place in text

SAI_Peregrinus2• 4 months ago

Yes, if you make things only slightly worse it's better than if you make them a lot worse. But neither is quite as good as not deliberately making things worse.

wgjordan• 4 months ago

Anthropic uses it across all their websites, here's a typical example where the effect is obvious as you scroll down: https://claude.com/solutions/agents

I could be wrong, but my simple guess is that it's become widespread in LLM-generated websites partly because of Anthropic's own style guides getting adopted through Claude-bundled skills and such.

Waterluvian• 4 months ago

Are the little hand animation graphics meant to flicker like they're an epilepsy test? That was so awful I didn't have brain power left to notice the fade scroll.

psychoslave• 4 months ago

You are absolutely right!

ayhanfuat• 4 months ago

It is partly to blame, yes. This is from Claude’s official frontend skill:

“Motion: Use animations for effects and micro-interactions. Prioritize CSS-only solutions for HTML. Use Motion library for React when available. Focus on high-impact moments: one well-orchestrated page load with staggered reveals (animation-delay) creates more delight than scattered micro-interactions. Use scroll-triggering and hover states that surprise.”

apsurd• 4 months ago

https://webflow.com/ is what i blame for the fade-in on scroll module.

15 years ago it did look very polished, boutique, professional. Now that it's a module everyone can do, everyone literally does it for every module.

Also there's tailwind that likely has a module for all the modules in webflow.

mavamaarten• 4 months ago

On top of that, that page took 10 seconds to load. On a Gbit network connection, lol

peab• 4 months ago

the effect in this example fine though, and not obnoxious like OPs? I don't get it

quietbritishjim• 4 months ago

That's a bit different since those are separate chunks of content rather than running prose (and they're mainly meaningless marketing fluff anyway). I don't find it all that annoying compared to the original article.

RobotToaster2• 4 months ago

Parts also seem to ignore prefers-reduced-motion.

dreko• 4 months ago

This is a great example of LLM feedback loops. Anthropic's site uses scroll fade, Claude's training data includes Anthropic's site, Claude recommends scroll fade to users, those sites become future training data. The web converges on one aesthetic and nobody remembers choosing it.

h4ch1• 4 months ago

I used to inject a prefers-reduced-motion: true to most websites a few years back when this trend really picked up; and generally have all animations turned off at the OS level and at least on mac that injects reduced motion preference to the browser.

So for example on claude's website I get no animations, pretty good QoL improvement. Now webdevs HONORING prefers-reduced motion, that can vary.

llm_nerd• 4 months ago

It definitely isn't prevalent, and usually is for "feature" pieces (like an expose on the Washington Post back when they were a real newspaper), along with product pages.

Apple uses it for their various pages, and it is legitimately annoying-

https://www.apple.com/iphone/

Tesla is a fan as well-

https://www.tesla.com/models

Occasionally sites use lazy loaded images, and do a "fade in" effect when they're actually loaded. Nothing wrong with that particular use.

flexagoon• 4 months ago

https://www.tesla.com/models

Love how that page takes almost 10 seconds to load for the first time on a 200Mbps connection

RobotToaster2• 4 months ago

Are you sure you don't have prefers-reduced-motion enabled? I just found out I already have it enabled when I went to look for how to enable it...

ge96• 4 months ago

The goldfish

It goes where you click in the water area

nicman23• 4 months ago

do not the scroll

i will umatrix you

yards• 4 months ago

I raise you one. Death to the parallax scroll. In fact, death to all scroll animations.

ryandrake3• 4 months ago

Scrolling should just move a fixed size view up and down a fixed sized page. Why on earth must everyone complicate it so much?

marssaxman2• 4 months ago

I don't understand why browsers ever let designers fuck up the scrolling mechanism in the first place. Why is that even possible?

pier25• 4 months ago

Absolutely.

I'm not against animations in UI design but these should be used purposefully to direct the user's attention on something or for minimal aesthetic effect. When everything is moving it's just like adding a ton of ketchup to everything.

ivanjermakov• 4 months ago

Death to scroll event override in general. Messes up my vimium smooth scrolling.

halapro3• 4 months ago

Real parallax is fine if done well. A subtle image parallax looks great on some websites. If you're talking about "move any random element at different speed without rhyme or reason," then yeah, I agree with you. We all hate it.

ryandrake3• 4 months ago

This post purposefully ignores the reduced motion preference to give everyone the same truly terrible experience. I am sorry. Please use your browser’s reader mode.

"Reader Mode" shouldn't even be a special mode. It should just be the default browsing experience, and users who want all this styling crap should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something.

apples_oranges• 4 months ago

what a good idea to have this automatically come up when the page opens, and perhaps give user a few seconds to press escape to get rid of it, if needed

carlosjobim3• 4 months ago

Why just a few seconds? In reader mode you can press escape any time to close it.

carlosjobim3• 4 months ago

On MacOS and iOS you can set reader mode as default. You should set reader mode as default.

MoonWalk7• 4 months ago

"should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something."

Bwahahaha, +1! This reminds me of calling Windows XP's default motif "Fisher-Price" mode. Which, sadly, looks professional and efficient compared to Windows (and, increasingly, the Mac) today.

mghackerlady3• 4 months ago

I actually think modern windows looks nice. It isn't nearly as good as the classic 9x look, but fluent obviously is a response to the visual shitshow that was 10

bigyabai• 4 months ago

Big Sur made me take back every Fischer Price comment I ever made about Windows XP. I didn't think it was possible to make a more childish UI than Aqua, but here we are.

HerbManic2• 4 months ago

I like that Apple was trying somwthing that has a little more texture and soul to it, but Liquid glass needs a lot of work to be made more subtle and usable. 10 out of 10 idea, 3 out of 10 execution.

hapless• 4 months ago

the reason "reader mode" isn't the default is to discourage website authors from intentionally breaking reader mode

-_-

SilasX2• 4 months ago

This. It's fundamentally a social problem. The moment that reader mode becomes the default, they'll start gradually extending it with "useful" additions until it's just as bloated and painful again, and then we'll have some rebrand of the concept of reader mode, and the cycle starts anew.

"Why can't we have a functional version of the site for the blind, and the normal one for everyone else?"

'We have that! It's called HTML!"

Edit: Earlier version of this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224961

pwdisswordfishy2• 4 months ago

s/discourage/avoid encouraging/ but yes.

wtallis12• 4 months ago

I want a reader mode that renders the page as if it were in an extremely tall window (ie. 10+ screens tall), then gives me a scrollable view of that static image of the rendered page. My browser should lie to the page on my behalf, and make it behave as if everything were already on-screen.

sp1rit• 4 months ago

Materialistic[0] effectively does this (minus the screenshot part), not intentional I think (I belive it makes the webview as tall as the requested page and then uses the OS native scroll widget to add a scrollbar for it). The problem I regularly encounter with this is sites that have a vertically centered popup (cookie banner, newsletter, etc.), with a backdrop that obscures the whole page. You first have to scroll down quite a bit (half the size of the article) to be able to click the popup away.

[0] https://github.com/hidroh/materialistic

sublinear3• 4 months ago

There are no bad animations, only bad designs.

If you design the animation to be way over the top like this, and then design the page to use it on every line then of course it looks like shit.

This is like arguing against any amount of sugar in food and then shoveling it into someone's mouth to try to prove your point. It's disingenuous and you aren't proving anything. I don't even think the top agreeing comments here are coming from web devs or the target users.

kbelder• 4 months ago

If you sped this up, and minimized it to the point it was unnoticeable, it would not hurt the browsing experience.

But that raises the question...

wtallis12• 4 months ago

Animations need to to serve a purpose.

Fading in is justifiable when you're adding new content on top of existing content, and need to draw attention to the fact that something changed in that part of the screen. None of that applies in the case of fade-in during scrolling. The user is already scrolling, everything on screen is moving, and new content is already expected to be coming in to view at the bottom of the window. Adding animations on top of all of that doesn't help anything, and just distracts from and delays presentation of the content the user was already trying to reveal.

sublinear3• 4 months ago

Scroll-fade does serve a purpose when used correctly, and others have posted real world examples of this already. It's so subtle that without them hardly anyone even knew what this blog post was ranting about.

It's just a way to draw attention to text without solely relying on typeface modifiers.

The real designs bring attention to what users are scrolling past as it flies by on the screen. That temporary urgency is why it's an animation. This is something that weight, height, underline, etc. cannot do as clearly. It's usually on the h-tags only, not every single line. That communicates the page structure too. It's clever and attractive when done right. It's not a new idea, and nobody was complaining about it until now.

cogman10• 4 months ago

Really, almost any animation or hijacking on scrolling should be abolished. It's one of the most disgusting things to encounter on a webpage.

I don't want your product to spin while I scroll down. I don't want animations or boxes to start appearing or disappearing. I don't want helpful tooltips, popups, or "I hope you enjoyed this" notifications to appear as I scroll.

What I want when I scroll is for the page to move, either up or down, in a completely consistent manner. I want to be able to reasonably predict what I'll see as I go up or down.

Apple loves this shit. Fortunately they aren't AS BAD as they once were, but you'll still encounter it on their product pages.

https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/

jevndev• 4 months ago

My least favorite by far is the “multi section” webpage design. Where the page is split into multiple whole-screen sections and scrolling the mouse wheel alternates between either moving between sections or playing the animations of that section. Yes please make my scroll wheel only sometimes actually scroll the page and other times rotate a graphic for way too long thanks

alprado50• 4 months ago

Agree. I understand why people like those animations and sometimes even i want to implement these in my website with GSAP, but then i remember that these animations make my content harder to read.

MoonWalk7• 4 months ago

Another major pisser is sites that deliberately disable zooming on their mobile incarnations. WTF, WHY? My favorite was when Google imperiously declared that it would "punish" "non-mobile-friendly" sites in their search results... but then disabled zooming on its own pages.

levmiseri• 4 months ago

I'm guilty of this as well. https://kraa.io/about has some fade-in animation for the intro text – driven by wanting the initial impression to be focused/minimal and 'unravel' as you go. I take it that most HN folks would vastly prefer to NOT have this?

sublinear3• 4 months ago

I think it looks fine except it's missing a more obvious hint that there's more to see when I scroll. The one that's there is just textual and very delayed.

medbar• 4 months ago

Not sure if I second this or not. I did want to scroll, but I don't know how much of that was influenced from the context or the extreme minimalism making me want to look for more - I'm interested in how I would have reacted to the site not knowing it had scroll fade. I could see an argument with the "Don't Make Me Think" principle.

wincy2• 4 months ago

I’ll say as someone who suffers from severe motion sickness and the OP site makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, that your site does the fade in fast enough that it doesn’t give me any discomfort. Seems fine to me. Maybe I should consider being a consultant for vestibular motion sickness accessibility, haha. I’d get paid to answer “on a scale of 1-10, how pukey does this app make you feel?”

marcosdumay• 4 months ago

Gotta love the attention to detail at the end, that is illegible when selected too.

It's not realistic, though. Illegible sites never get that detail right.

kevin_thibedeau• 4 months ago

They usually inhibit selection to protect their sacred text.

wincy2• 4 months ago

Hah, the point has certainly been made. Absolute Barf-o-Rama.

I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness, which hasn’t really improved as an adult, and this page immediately made me feel like I’m going to throw up. Had to switch to reader mode after the first image. I was always the kid who couldn’t read in the car, and was always groggy on long road trips because of Dramamine (side note, Meclizine has significantly improved my life, as it has largely the same effect without drowsiness). As an adult I’m fine as long as I’m in the front seat, public transit is terrible for me. Elevators are tiny torture chambers, especially when stopping on multiple floors. And it’s cumulative, the sensation becomes worse the more I’m exposed to it over the course of a day (I have a mental “theme park budget” in my head of how many rides I can comfortably do!). VR can’t have any motion that isn’t firmly anchored to a sense of place (space ship/driving sims are okay though!)

I’m glad awareness is being raised about this, but I’m curious what websites are using this now? Is it just personal blogs and the like right now? I definitely would have noticed this cropping up on websites I frequent.

snozolli• 4 months ago

I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness

I don't, and yet I am also feeling nauseated after reading that page! What a truly awful experience.

freedomben• 4 months ago

As an adult I’m fine as long as I’m in the front seat, public transit is terrible for me.

Me too! The worst part about this is anytime there's more than two adults in the vehicle, the "front seat" has all sorts of social expectations and courtesies. I once mentioned that I get motion sick when not in the front seat, and I could tell that nobody believed me and thought it was an uncool way to try and guilt people into letting me monopolize the favored chair. After that I don't bother, but do try to avoid shared cars because in those I'll be quietly sitting in a torture chamber while others around me don't understand.

Also, good God those drivers whould constantly gas-brake-gas-gas-brake-gas-brake-brake-gas. I get it when all the sudden traffic rapidly and unexpectedly slows down, but so many people seem to always be pressing at least one pedal, never coasting. It's torture

rickydroll• 4 months ago

Oh good, I'm not the only one. Right now, I have an ocular migraine from a few minutes on that website, and I'm trying not to revisit my lunch.

xnx• 4 months ago

It's amazing how web graphic designers don't realize 99% of all added motion/animation is just as annoying and unnecessary as <blink> and <marquee>.

ToucanLoucan• 4 months ago

Oh they know, but it's requested because clients want a fancy website, and just having fucking text on the fucking screen explaining what you fucking sell is boooooring.

And also completely functional and accessible but where's the fun in that?

thenthenthen2• 4 months ago

Yep. And then complain how it’s not loading/stuttering. I guess we need a new website…

realityfactchex2• 4 months ago

I thought this was going to be about iOS and how now (as of iOS 26) there is a "fade out" at the top of every web page (around the notch/top-edge area).

When scrolling/reading a web page, it literally changes that section of the text so that it fades to gray.

So, "everything scroll fades".

I couldn't find a way to turn it off. Quite irritating, IMHO.

EDITED TO ADD ELABORATION: The issue with iOS "scroll fade" text color in Safari near the top notch is that this makes that top-edge-text "dynamic" (changing) and thus "draws attention" to it visually, thus competing for eyeball attention when I am probably actually reading somewhere further down on the page. Also, I would still like to be able to glance up to the topmost visible text if wanted, without having to adjust to its different and less visible colors. Apple designers should know all this. Further, I'd say the page text color should probably by default respect what the web page designer configured it as, and not have the OS change that text color (unless the user gets fancy and requests an override with dark mode or whatever settings).

This article's critique seems valid, too (more generically about "scroll fade" in interfaces, e.g. web pages, which seems to mostly be about items appearing gradually via motion). Personally, I see less of that these days, compared to making every page in an OS fade out where unnecessary.

jerlam2• 4 months ago

I turned on "Reduce Transparency", and instead of a fade, it turns the top and bottom sections of the screen into blank white space.

My "edge to edge screen" iPhone now resembles the last generation of iPhones with home button from 2017.

nottorp2• 4 months ago

It's that bad?

How about they give us back small iPhones with 4" screens then and whoever wants the fade can imagine it outside the physical phone?

hedora5• 4 months ago

On iOS 26 (up to date as of this comment), the Orion web browser from Kagi does not have this problem.

It also supports firefox and chrome extensions, so you can use things like UBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.

MoonWalk7• 4 months ago

Even better iOS example of not just "scroll fade" but regressive and incompetent UI design: the moving of Music's playback controls from the empty area at the top of the window into the content-browser area... where the controls are "transparent" and overlap the text and thumbnail images there. And all that stuff in the content-browser pane? Yep, it scroll-fades.

charcircuit• 4 months ago

This website has a slow and laggy implementation which unfairly shows off the effect.

msarnoff• 4 months ago

Originally read the URL as “D-Bus Hell dot com” and was like… yup.

confounder• 4 months ago

Amen. So cathartic to see someone publish the post I've been wanting to write for a while, and with a much better title.

Also: I've noticed a new abuse recently of sites implementing scroll momentum on desktop — has anyone else seen this? I couldn't believe it, but there it was.

wtallis12• 4 months ago

Sites overriding scroll behavior to implement their own smooth scroll behavior with the wrong speed has been a thing for many years. It's a bit harder to notice if you're using a traditional mouse wheel, but is really easy to notice on a decent laptop touchpad.

It's a inexcusable usability disaster.

netrap• 4 months ago

Death to Scroll Bar size change!!!

rc_mob• 4 months ago

I wish this blog stopped the scroll fading after it made ita point. would have really hammered it home.

burningChrome• 4 months ago

I've always been under the impression it was lazy loading the page to increase page loading times for content above the fold? At least this was why I started using it about 8 years ago.

Its like anything though. I think people just thought it was a cool effect and so it wasn't about page speed any more, it was just about something people used to add some panache to their sites.

Kind of like people who've been abusing modals for the last decade or so. lol

MichaelDickens• 4 months ago

I'm not a web dev but if the goal is to improve load times, I'd think it would make more sense to load the full article text up front, and lazy load heavier data like images and video? I've seen a lot of websites that do it that way.

cwillu• 4 months ago

But then a fast reader might be able to read faster than the ads could load!

hedora5• 4 months ago

In reader mode on iOS 26, there is some scroll jank, presumably due to hidden scroll fade.

(Take this as another excuse not to hijack scrolling behavior, not an actual request you improve your implementation of tacky-mode.)

sodapopcan• 4 months ago

I'm someone who loves over-the-top, creative-for-the-sake-of-creative web design, even for something primarily text-based like a blog post, I 100% sympathize with and want to accommodate those who don't.

I think `prefers-tacky` is a brilliant idea! It means excess decorative images could avoid even being downloaded if the user so chooses.

bingemaker• 4 months ago

I worked for a client who was all about scrolljacking. Then he discovered parallax effect, and there was no looking back. He fired me, and got another team who didn't have any opinions.

Now the page stutters on every device other than iPhone 16+ with 5G. :shrug:

xenadu022• 4 months ago

Scrolling is broken by everyone everywhere.

Scrolling to the bottom then forcing me to click "show more"? Lazy. A truly horrible experience. I don't know how anyone could think that is a good idea. The worst offenders are the ones showing me products. You might as well not have pages of products at all. Just tell me these 12 are the only ones you have because I've already lost interest. Not that most web stores are any good - most have no useful ability to search or browse so finding anything is like digging through a junk drawer. It all screams "we hate selling product, please go away".

Next worst? Everything Google makes and all the fools who copied them: scroll down, scrolling hard stops, then a few seconds later the next segment of content loads. The scrollbar position is naught but lies. WHY??? Are you proud of that? Because you shouldn't be. You should be ashamed. Demand-load the content behind the scenes so scrolling is continuous and smooth. If the user scrolls fast then skip pages and/or cancel prior requests. The scrolling is the priority, lazy-load the content as needed... but for f*k sake don't do what Google does.

The top worst: hijacking scrolling for any form of animation or to change direction. Absolutely horrid and I leave any webpage that does this out of spite. This just screams "I'M A DESIGNER, LOOK AT MEEEEE!!!!!". It is code equivalent of being "too clever", but for UX. If you don't want people to buy your product or signup for your service but instead be impressed by your ability to vomit out D-E-S-I-G-N then by all means proceed. Everyone is guilty of this, even those who should know better.

SAI_Peregrinus2• 4 months ago

I'll add having a floating header that covers the top portion of the page, and only appears when you scroll up. I like to read text in the top third of the page, then scroll down so the lines I'm reading are still in the top third of the page. With the height of my monitor that's the most comfortable position, this should usually be the case if following common ergonomic guidelines. If I scroll up, very often such a header will appear & cover the text I was trying to scroll up to read, so I have to scroll farther. Then it's visible, so I scroll down to move it back up to the top portion of the page as the header goes away. Lather, rinse, repeat, install a uBlock origin filter to get rid of floating headers.

halapro3• 4 months ago

You might want to take some time off the internet, I can smell your liver from here.

The internet sucks, it always sucked, most people don't know how to do anything properly, trends ruin everything else. It's always going to suck, most things do. Time to take a chill pill and learn to live with it.

xenadu022• 4 months ago

You might want to take some time off the internet, I can smell your liver from here.

I'm not sure what that means? Liver? Is that a drinking thing? I don't really drink so I dunno.

Time to take a chill pill and learn to live with it.

I don't agree. Changes in trends can start many ways and one of them is by tech people complaining to other tech people.

It wasn't originally possible to hijack the browser's scrolling function (or history). Just like the early days of GUIs and windowing systems: some people take those tools and make an absolute mess. If no one ever yells at them for it they and those around them won't learn to be ashamed of making messes.

shevy-java• 4 months ago

This is the modern day blinking HTML tag.

I also hate infinite scrolling.

I much prefer to have websites simple at all times. I understand that stylish means it must look good and elegant, but this often ends up annoying me to no ends. Without ublock origin I would go nuts. I use it more to get rid of HTML I don't want to see. All pop-ups and slide-ins for instance. These things should never ever happen. Any notification should happen differently, or not at all. Often it is "please donate to us" - I understand their use case, but how is this relevant to my use case?

liendolucas• 4 months ago

I can only add another aberration that it just started to happen on my browsers without even updating or doing anything at all: I get the master volume raised, I mean not the YouTube volume, but the volume that is reported in my OS.

I truly don't know how this is possible or how should I turn it off completely. There are some settings in Firefox but the ones I have tried do not work.

This is one of the worst things I have seen in many years, along with all the other aberrations that are already spread on the net.

Night_Thastus3• 4 months ago

Something else scroll-related I personally hate:

Sticky 'headers' that disappear when you scroll down, and appear when you scroll up. I hate them so much. It hurts my brain to see the stupid thing appear and disappear constantly if I scroll around a page.

The worst part is you can't even zap them out of the way with something like uBlock, because then there's no header even when you're at the top of the page. >:(

EDIT: Whoops, flipped the directions. Complaint still stands though.

adventured• 4 months ago

Screen real-estate for legitimate content is often at a premium and then they go and steal some of that land with sticky headers and or footers. I occasionally run across mobile sites that use both at the same time, while throwing in ads here and there, it's an atrocious experience.

tylervigen2• 4 months ago

Yes but then I think they should leave the header at the top of the page. If I need it I'll scroll all the way back up! Don't make it randomly re-appear and cover the text I wanted to see because I decided to re-read that last paragraph.

adito• 4 months ago

Oh. This. Tho I solved that with userstyles.

Griffinsauce• 4 months ago

Joke's on you, we implement all animations in JS

cowpig• 4 months ago

Interesting, I find sticky headers to be the bane of my existence, and the ones that disappear but reappear on scroll up are a lesser evil

vmg12• 4 months ago

Also if anything it should disappear when scrolling down and appear when scrolling up.

hbn• 4 months ago

That's how they work. It's what the GP said.

lebuin• 4 months ago

God yes. For some reason, I automatically scroll in such a way that I always keep what I'm reading at the very top of the screen. Which means that every time I want to reread a sentence I first have to scroll past the header.

Illniyar3• 4 months ago

This is literally the best ux pattern you can have. It is intuitive - user immediately discovers it when performing the obvious action, it increases the user experience (more text to read) without any real downside.

It is the first thing I suggest to anyone when I see someone didn't implement it.

I've never heard a complaint about it until now.

nativeit• 4 months ago

I consider it context-dependent. If a site is intended for users to jump around to different pages often, then sticky headers make sense. If it’s designed for long-form articles or scrolling through feeds, then non-sticky headers make sense. When I have implemented them on my own sites, I try to keep them minimal and unobtrusive. But I also have never heard this complaint specifically, until now.

zbrozek• 4 months ago

I absolutely hate it. If you haven't heard a complaint about it, you haven't tried hard enough to get feedback.

There is no context which makes it OK.

underlipton• 4 months ago

You could just have a "hide bar" button. Dunno how you get it back, maybe put your design smarts there.

Stop making things "intuitive" and expose explicit options to users.

HerbManic2• 4 months ago

The user discovers it because it is practically forced on them. It is awful UI.

zimzam• 4 months ago

This is only true if you assume users always scroll down while reading and the only reason they scroll up is to find the header... but many of us scroll up and down while reading and find the re-appearance of the header to interfere with our goal of reading the content. So there is a clear downside for us "up and down" readers.

I don't know what portion of users we are though, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one!

carlosjobim3• 4 months ago

It's awful for the user. There is no reason why scrolling up should perform any other action then scrolling up the content. Zero benefit for anybody involved.

orthoxerox• 4 months ago

It might be useful if you wait until the user has scrolled more than 20% of the viewport and not pop it out immediately.

toss12• 4 months ago

>without any real downside

Wow, impressive blindness!

Seriously, have you ever used one? Because most people do not read monotonically downwards. We often scroll back to see something in a previous sentence referred to in the spot we are reading. So we want to go back one or two lines. Bot NOOOOooo, the header pops up, covers 1/4 of the screen, so now we have to scroll that much more, pushing off the screen the other text we hoped to keep on the screen, and it might even go through a few adjustments. So, now, what was a non-event less distracting than turning the page in a book or magazine has now become a fully distracting scroll-fest.

Is that clear enough for you?

>This is literally the best ux pattern you can have.

NOT EVEN CLOSE. The best User Experience pattern is to give the reader what they asked for AND NOTHING MORE. Nothing more for you, nothing more for your advertisers, and nothing more for them. We click to read the content, LET US READ the content, ALL the content, and NOTHING BUT the content. We'll even understand if some proper STATIC adverts are placed in the content, and we might even click thru if you've shown us something relevant and interesting

But as soon as you start putting motion and other distraction in the adverts, my priority becomes NOT reading the advert, but figuring out how to get it out of my face. And if by some chance I remember it, it is filed among "companies to avoid".

Why does it seem everyone who deals with advertising, from the execs down to the programmers, so stupidly thinks only of the first-order effects — "Grab Their Attention!" — and not the second-order effects, where being so offensive — surprise! — offends people...

jjj123• 4 months ago

I’m curious if after reading the dozen or so replies you’ve changed your opinion here, at least a little?

For the record, I am also a user who scrolls up often while reading, so I find the header thing more frustrating than useful.

MrSkelter• 4 months ago

You know what tells people there’s more to read? The fact the sentences are cut and the piece hasn’t concluded.

As for “no overhead” what about all the code needed to implement this?

Pages of text should be minimally styled for maximum efficiency.

gibspaulding• 4 months ago

This only really works easily on desktop and requires a click, but is very satisfying to use:

https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

m463• 4 months ago

same thing intersects with ios safari when it hides top and bottom tool bars, hate that too.

and with the website doing the same thing, it's a mess.

kreyenborgi2• 4 months ago

Oh god yes I absolutely hate those. Who on earth thought that was a good idea.

There is a special circle in hell where designers of such sites have to actually use the sites they design.

dylan6043• 4 months ago

someone designing for mobile first and wanted to maximize screen space. we don't have to be obtuse about it. it was an idea that just didn't go over as well as hoped. clearly, some people like it. it's not your cup of tea, great. now, we all know your feelings. next time i build a site, i'll be sure to get your opinions first.

nathanaldensr• 4 months ago

ZeroHedge is one of the worst offenders for this.

matheusmoreira4• 4 months ago

I just zap them with uBlock Origin anyway. Whatever was in that header, chances are it was not important.

zombot• 4 months ago

Safari has a "Remove Distracting Elements" feature. Try that. Some web sites can only be visited with the weapons of an exterminator at hand.

bouke• 4 months ago

This! And to make matters worse is the header is removed from the document flow, causing the content to jump up when scrolling down. And if you then scroll up to try to read the content that jumped out of the viewport, the stupid header is injected back into the flow causing the content to jump down again. Sigh.

WickyNilliams• 4 months ago

Mea culpa: this is kinda my doing. I released a library headroom.js (https://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/) for this purpose in 2013 or something, announced here on HN, and it got very popular. It got ported to every framework imaginable. And tons of websites either used it or imitated it.

I think it can be done well, but most do not do it well. Partially my fault because the defaults in headroom were not how I would recommend it. It had a tolerance option, which meant you had to scroll up so far/fast to trigger the reveal. But in my eternal foolishness I set this to zero by default. Adding a little tolerance makes it much less jittery and more intentionally triggered. And thus much less annoying. See the header on the site, it doesn't appear/disappear with every 1px movement

marcjensen• 4 months ago

Could a custom filter for uBlock solve the problem (if there's nothing useful on the header?

For one of my pages I tried this:

  ! 21 Mar 2026 https://oko.press
  oko.press##.navbar__mobile

jeff_tyrrill2• 4 months ago

I feel like the scroll fade fad is misunderstanding layered on bugs, turtles all the way down.

Once upon a time, developers implemented lazy loading of images, to save bandwidth. However, some developers implemented it poorly, waiting until the moment an image is scrolled on-screen to even start loading it, leading to a visible blip as you scroll.

(The better way would be to load an additional pageful of images beyond the current scroll view, which would provide enough time to load before scrolling into view at least most of the time. However, this doesn't maximally save bandwidth and some developers don't make good tradeoffs between diminishing returns on saving bandwidth vs. visibly degraded UX.)

Then, designers saw the blip-into-view effect, thought it was an intentional visual effect (rather than an artifact of poorly implemented lazy loading), but thought, oh, I'll fix it so it looks nice, with fading.

And here we are with a dumb visual fad originating from a bug without realizing it was a bug.

tylervigen2• 4 months ago

...is that really the story? It feels like these are two related, but different things.

jeff_tyrrill2• 4 months ago

I haven't dug into the history to see if this is really how it happened. I'd actually feel better if it wasn't true but it's the thought that occurred to me when I noticed the scroll fade effect becoming popular.

saghm• 4 months ago

I'm not sure it's feasible to prove or disprove how this design trend started. I wouldn't be shocked if it was true, but I also wouldn't be shocked if it wasn't. I'd be more surprised if we ever found out for sure one way or another than about what the truth is.

halapro3• 4 months ago

If you opened any "web design awards" website you'd know how terribly wrong you are.

People will animate the sh out of any element exclusively for you to go "wow". It does not go much deeper than that. Designers and developers spend weeks scrolling up and down completely disregarding content. It looks cool, nothing else matters.

hirako2000• 4 months ago

What sucks with scroll fade is when it fades slower than one can read or scroll.

Fading the entire content very fast, so fast that it's barely perceptible is actually better on the eyes.

Blinking hurts. Fast changing contrast hurts. The fade is a natural effect I use everywhere almost. My eyes never complained, rather are grateful for the small effort it takes to get right

wtallis12• 4 months ago

The motion of the scrolling already ensures that the new content is revealed gradually. There's no need for a fade-in animation on top of that. It's just punishing the user for scrolling too fast.

Animats• 4 months ago

This terrible idea is a parody of a good idea from game design - LOD cross-fade. When a distant object changes from a low level of detail representation to a higher one, or vice versa, the change is best done as a cross fade. The old one fades out to transparent, the new one fades in from transparent.

This is done to hide the change, not as a creative effect. The human visual system is very sensitive to fast changes. But below half a second, smooth changes are not too noticeable. With this trick, plus a slight amount of distance haze, you can get away with quite low detail distant models. That's part of how GTA V does those long vistas efficiently.

Here's a long drive around the GTA V world.[1] Watch how background objects change. Many distant background objects start out with very low detail. Watch power line towers, for example, which are very low detail until about 100m range. The cross-fade to a better model takes about a half second. Active players don't notice.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws_yYxUaWRE

wtallis12• 4 months ago

It works for games because the fade-in of distant objects happens long before the object in question becomes the focus of the user's attention. It cannot work well for scrolling a web page because getting to the new content is the entire reason the user is scrolling the page, so they're going to be looking right at it (and trying to read it) during the fade.

MDCore• 4 months ago

I couldn't do the mandatory onboarding training at a job once because the course web app had heavy scroll fade, and I got nauseous after a few minutes. I tried every few hours for weeks. Eventually I said I couldn't do it. They had to print it out to pdf for me, and gave me a pass on the courses that were dependent on animation to work.

thorncorona2• 4 months ago

My favorite part of the iPhone 17 pro / ios26 combo is that it lags on any and everything that remotely touches the GPU like this website.

thenthenthen2• 4 months ago

No stutter on iPhone 12 18.5

thorncorona2• 4 months ago

Next phone will be an android at this rate if Apple can’t solve this garbage

slopinthebag2• 4 months ago

As always with this stuff, it's only bad when you notice it. When it's done right you just think "That was a nicely designed page".

delbronski5• 4 months ago

Why do web animations get so much hate with the HN crowd?

I think a website is similar to a painting. Some will make you dizzy by just looking at them, and others will be a minimalist dream.

Don’t hate me HN, but I say keep messing with the scroll bar, keep making annoying blinking banners, have your way with scroll fade.

Don’t listen to these web dev veterans, they are just like snobby movie critics!

bigstrat20032• 4 months ago

They get hate because they are almost always annoying and distract from the actual content. Nobody cares how creative your web page design is if it sucks to use so badly that a plain text page would be better.

delbronski5• 4 months ago

But do they really suck to use so badly? Like for real? The examples that have been listed in the comments (Apple and Claude sites) look totally fine to me. People here are talking about them like they are the worse websites ever.

matheusmoreira4• 4 months ago

Because it's just as tasteless as the beginner who discovered the font dropdown and chose Papyrus. Yeah we're all marvelling at your web coding prowess -- has the actual content shown up on screen yet?

Reminds me of me the https://motherfuckingwebsite.com.

Shit's legible and gets your fucking point across (if you had one instead of just 5mb pics of hipsters drinking coffee)

delbronski5• 4 months ago

Ah yes, taste. That thing that is definitely NOT subjective, and NOT influenced by cultural norms and personal preferences rather than universal standards.

Yes you are right, guess you guys do have better “web taste”.

Why would anyone prefer pics of hipster drinking coffee over plain text?

Telaneo2• 4 months ago

Most websites are not a piece of art made only for its own sake an beauty (or lack thereof). The unstated intention of most websites is to transfer information to the reader. Making the reader dizzy, or hiding some of that information behind animations or stupid headers does not aid information transfer.

jjcm• 4 months ago

There's a very simple fix I typically do when it comes to animations:

    animationCount = 0
    animateElement(el) {
        el.animate({duration: BASE_DURATION / animationCount})
        animationCount++
    }

(formula exagerated for simplicity)

Essentially, for any animation that gets repeated, it should decrease in duration over time. This makes things impactful when they're first being displayed, but they very quickly approach an extremely minimal state, making things feel snappy.

rgbjoy• 4 months ago

This is why I chose a fade-in reveal https://www.rgbjoy.com/

Illniyar3• 4 months ago

Looking at the main site, seems like it's branded as a "no AI frontend consultant".

First time I'm seeing a "no AI" used to differentiate a work for hire.

Can't say this wasn't obviously coming. Boutique hand-coded consultancies/software-houses are probably going to spring up a lot.

quchen• 4 months ago

I used to use WikiTok [1] on my phone at times, but now they’ve introduced »words appear word by word« on the mobile version. Baffles me, why one would hide and gradually reveal any sort of content. It’s nauseating!

[1] https://www.wikitok.io/

LocalH• 4 months ago

The HTML of that last paragraph sent me lmao

darkteflon• 4 months ago

Oh yeah. Fucking hate this. Apple does it with their product pages. You have to swipe like crazy and it’s impossible to move past their pictures / animations to get to the next text block until they’ve decided that you’ve seen enough. Another one of those “this can’t have actually been used by anyone at Apple” things they seem to do so well recently.

bartread• 4 months ago

I mean, fine, I don’t love scrollfade either, and I realise this site is trying to prove a point but, FFS, most of the problems can be solved by forcing the scroll fade to complete in 100 - 300ms as opposed to some glacially slow multi-second pace.

Like I say, I don’t love it, but when we create sites we all have control over animation durations and there’s enough UX guidance around response times to easily avoid it completely sucking.

So the real problems isn’t scrollfade, it’s that - in the face of overwhelming data - it’s both mandated and implemented poorly by people with no taste.

If you’re going to implement any animation of any kind at least do us all the bare minimum courtesy and take 5 minutes to do some research into what works and what doesn’t first.

andai2• 4 months ago

Bonus points when they offset the scrollbar 1px from the edge of the screen so you can't click on it easily. (If you're lucky enough that they've merely made it 3px wide instead of removing it altogether!)

andai2• 4 months ago

I thought scroll fade was going to be that thing where, while you scroll, a newsletter popup box slowly fades into view. (I got one on the next HN post I clicked after this one!)

Death to Scroll Fade

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