Machina improba

The return of 'bar'-style frames

A while ago -- at approximately the same time -- Facebook and Digg both started using a 'Navigation Bar' plopped at the top of all their outgoing links. Anyone who will remember the late 90's on the web will find this tactic familiar. Why is it annoying? Because it steals traffic, that's why.

It was scummy then, and it's even scummier now. The blogosphere responded rather quickly to Digg's implementation of it: everything from a firefox addon to strip it to a greasemonkey script to automate its removal from the sites you visit.

Which is why they backed down fairly quickly.

Facebook does the same thing now. A difference is that Facebook is far more immune to criticism from their userbase. I don't know if the cause is their 'too big to fail' attitude or just general disconnect from their userbase. No matter. Back in the late 1990's we had a solution to this problem: a javascript framebreaker. One line of javascript is all it takes.

Comments

it's the disney

it's the disney effect,everything that was old is new to the next generation (see their "locked in the vault tv ads")

so every internet fad can come back every 7 years...not to mention it can be introduced to middle east countries 12 years behind the internet design curve (government websites love the flashing/rotating animated gifs)

rernst's picture

I like to call it the 'wheel

I like to call it the 'wheel of reincarnation', though in this case 'Carnival of Annoyance' might be a better bet. It had a simple solution then, and it still has that same simple solution :)

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