JS (JavaScript) Overlay Hall of Shame

JS Overlay Hall of Shame

Glad to see that I have company of other folks who hate this annoying shit of the interwebs.

Another annoyed individual expressing his frustration over this internet annoyance...

https://stiobhart.net/2015-05-04-overlays-new-popups/
https://stiobhart.net/2015-08-18-jsoverlaysrevisited/

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Javascript Overlays Are The Pop-Ups 'De Nous Jours'

“Stop shoving crap in my face, if you want me to stay on your site!”

Just a leetle Overlay. Eet is verra theen! [Image Credit: Rex Features]

Remember the bad old days of the Intarwebs, when we used to all get annoyed about websites that shoved pop-up windows in our faces?

I think, somewhere in the ancient bowels of this blog, I once compared such goings on to; a waiter, unannounced, shoving the wine menu between your fork and the plate you were about to eat from and demanding you give it your attention… “RIGHT NOW!!!”.

It’s that kind of level of ill manners.

Well, thankfully those days are behind us now. Most browsers have the facility to block pop-up windows and, although it’s not 100% fool-proof, it works enough of the time that most websites have given up on pop-ups and, these days, you really only see them on the kind of sites which are the dingleberries on the arsehole of the internet anyway.

So, all’s right with the world now, then?

Well, not quite. For, of late, I’ve noticed that it seems an increasingly annoying number of websites are reviving the ‘delights’ of the old pop-up through Javascript Overlays.

Thanks to AJAX and the innumerable Javascript libraries it spawned, it’s possible to cause an overlay to appear on top of the content of your site, whilst someone is in the middle of reading it. This can be triggered in various ways such as: having the overlay appear after a set amount of time, or having it appear when the user scrolls past a certain point on your page. You’ll notice that, like our fictitious ‘rude waiter’, both of these techniques involve drawing you into the content first, then shoving the metaphorical wine menu between your fork and plate. And, unfortunately, unlike with traditional pop-ups, these insidious overlays are a lot harder to block, without disabling Javascript, which would cripple most of the modern intarwebs.

I’ve got so irked by this of late that I’ve started “voting with my eyeballs” by instantly closing any website which does this to me. It can be a bit of a wrench sometimes –especially if I was in the middle of reading something interesting or informative. But I think we should all start doing this, nonetheless.

If, while poring over their visitor stats, the webmasters of all these sites noticed that every time a page stuck a Javascript Overlay in someone’s face, that person left, they’d soon stop doing it.

And here, in no particular order other than my remembering to screengrab them at the time, is a ‘Hall of Shame’ which I’ve snapped over the past couple of weeks while browsing the web. This represents only a fraction of the annoying overlays I’ve seen during that time. But if any of the webmasters in question are reading this: As soon as you threw these overlays on top of what I was reading, I instantly left your site and took my goldfish attention span elsewhere.

So there!

Click on the link to the original articles to see ALL of the examples.
Damn Data Miners!

Link to original article...
https://stiobhart.net/2015-05-04-overlays-new-popups/


And more shame here...

The Face-Shitting Continues

“Javascript Overlay Hall of Shame Revisited [WARNING: Image Heavy]”

Link to original article and more screen shot examples...
https://stiobhart.net/2015-08-18-jsoverlaysrevisited/

We need a cure for javascript overlays aside from disabling javascript

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

BehindTheOverlay Chrome Extension Kills Overlay Popups

Remember, someone somewhere had put together a Google Chrome extension to block these annoying overlays that are hard to X out of, for the most part.  For an example of an impossible to X out of page is Mercola.com

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/overlay-blocker/fdemahcclkobakgfcofpooooicggkabb?hl=en
THIS one is no longer available.

Overlay Blocker is no longer available in the Chrome store, but they now have one called BehindTheOverlay.  BehindTheOverlay Chrome Extension Kills Overlay Popups.  It works, so far.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behindtheoverlay/ljipkdpcjbmhkdjjmbbaggebcednbbme/related?hl=en

Here is the one for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/behind_the_overlay/

You know these annoying javascript things that have to data mine emails in order to sign up for newsletters, even though there's an option on the sidebars to sign up for them.  And also soliciting for Facebook Likes for their facebook pages, etc...

It may need to be tweaked one some social media websites, so just play around with it and perhaps whitelist some sites, if they don't offer full functionality.  At least this should stop alot of that nonsense.

Attention Webmasters! Got a Clue Yet?

As I have said before.... "We dislike this shit!".   Are y'all getting a clue yet?  Get the hint?

FINALLY, enough people have complained (besides myself) about how much this is ANNOYING as hell.

It worked.

So NOW, someone somewhere put together a Google Chrome extension to block these annoying overlays that are hard to X out of, for the most part.  Especially those who use SmartPhones to browse the internet.

So now Google Chrome has an extension to block this anoying shit.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/overlay-blocker/fdemahcclkobakgfcofpooooicggkabb?hl=en

Edit:  Overlay Blocker is no longer available in the Chrome store, but they now have one called BehindTheOverlay.  It works, so far.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behindtheoverlay/ljipkdpcjbmhkdjjmbbaggebcednbbme/related?hl=en

You know these annoying javascript things that have to data mine emails in order to sign up for newsletters, even though there's an option on the sidebars to sign up for them.  And also soliciting for Facebook Likes for their facebook pages.

Done told you all that we are tired of this shit.   And now we can block all these nonsense and actually get to read the text on the various sites.

Thank you.

Web and Internet Annoyances...

I'm very glad to see I'm not the only one who gets frustrated and pissed off at all the excessive javascript on websites these days.

I'm talking about those java popups that obscure and grey out an entire webpage.  Some have a convenient close or x button, and there are some that do not.

And those popups to invite people to "LIKE" their page on Facebook or whatever social network.

I'm getting to the point where I hate the internet.

From:  http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?826674-Is-30-Javascript-Files-Too-Much

Am I the only one getting frustrated by the ridiculous overuse of Javascript in web pages these days? 

I wanted to check the temperature in my local area. So I browse to the website of my local television news station. The website loads slowly. It's like watching paint dry. It's reminiscent of being on dial-up. So I check the source and count over 30 javascript files being included. 

What happened to usability? What happened to the emphasis on speed and not making users wait over 15 seconds to view a web page? 

What kind of developer thinks it is a good idea to have that many javascript files included in a web page? The number of Javascript files I counted was 32 including analytics scripts. I can't imagine how long it would take to do all that on a slow connection.

No dude, you're not.  I personally think webmasters are ego trippin' on this unnecessary shit.

Here are some more comments on this webpage about it.  Some are pro-javascript and some are definitely ANTI-javascript.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/373818/whats-with-those-do-not-use-javascript-people

Javascript annoys me when it is required for the site to function, especially for things that should not depend on it (like opening a link). Basically your site should work perfectly with Javascript disabled - the Javascript should just make it nicer to use. 

Say I have javascript disabled (for whatever reason - security, paranoia, CPU usage, ad-blocking etc), I should still be view that picture, albeit not with a fancy Lightbox effect, or submit a form, again albeit without dynamic in-line error reporting)
There's nothing "wrong" with Javascript, it just shouldn't be obnoxious, or mandatory. 

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Javascript is a major attack vector for drive-by downloads. 

Many browser vulnerabilites can only be attacked through javaScript, and about half the security alerts issued about browsers read "while we're working on a patch to this vulnerability, you can protect yourself against it by disabling scripting".
On what machines do you think those spam bots are running? Nowadays, most of them fell victim to a drive-by download on some website that used Javascript to attack a browser vulnerability, and in many cases the malicious code got into that website through an XSS attack. A study conducted by Google last year found 10% of all websites they surveyed to contain such attacks! 

So yes, Javascript (Flash too, btw) is very much the problem, not the solution, and it's becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Eventually it will be too big to tolerate; you better be prepared to find a way to make your website work without Javascript when every single Joe User out there has (or closely knows someone who has) had their ebay acount, paypal account or even bank account broken into, and is told they could have avoided it by deactivating Javascript in their browser. 

Of course, this is a worst-case scenario, and maybe browser developers will manage to get their act together, or some sort of sandboxing technology for Javascript engines (or the browsers themselves) becomes prevalent, though that would still do nothing to counter XSS. 

But saying that Javascript is not a problem right now betrays appaling ignorance in someone who develops web apps professionally. 

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you all miss one important thing. With client-side scripting, MY BROWSER is where all the stuff is executed. And if I allow this to happen, I thereby give YOU, the damn site developer, nearly full control over my browser. I can even agree with some people here who says JavaScript as such (as a programming language) is not bad, the bad thing is the idea of client-side scripting. 

JavaScript being executed within the client's browser is malicious and dangerous by design. Many people continue to say that -- well -- JS virtual machines are buggy, yes, and security holes are found, one by one, in these machines, but the problem is not with the client side scripting, only with implementations of these virtual machines, and one day we implement a secure JS VM, and everything will be fine. That's LIE. Just one thing: the CPU time needed to render a page. Without Turing-complete code on the page, the time is just a (almost linear) function of the HTML length. But once we get the Turing-complete code and allow it to execute, the rendering time is not only no longer a function of anything, it is UNPREDICTABLE (hell, mathematically proven to be unpredictable). 

These web developers who use JS (actually, nearly all existing web developers, which is sad) force us, their users, to trust them so fanatically so we don't mind to give them full control on our browsers. Hey, may be you also need a key of my house?

So webmasters, businesses, product salespeople,etc...  LISTEN UP!

WE HATE THIS SHIT!   STOP IT!  Listen to your readers/clients/customers or lose them forever!

So I have to be bothered to install extensions on Firefox and Chrome such as YesScript, noscript and whatever script blocker needed to get rid of these friggin' annoyances, just so I can browse the internet in peace.

There's also boycotting sites too.

I guess I'll be the anti-javascript bitch?