Saturday, March 31, 2018

Increasingly irritating trying to read text on the web

Presumably desperate measures to fund journalism are leading to increasingly intrusive ads but I'm finding reading text on line is getting difficult. Here's what it's like opening a story on Vice.com:


Ads load above content, scrolling down what I'm reading. Ads slide up from the bottom obscuring the text and animation down the right draw my eye. To top it off, Safari now warns that significant energy is being used - maybe they're mining crypto-currency too?


Safari now won't auto-play videos with sound and soon Google Chrome will do the same thing plus block other annoying styles of ads. This is a war for our attention and I doubt it will stop there.

The answer on macOS and iOS is to use "reader view" which works well on most sites but strips away all the design. I've set reader view as on by default on some sites and maybe that's the answer.


Sorry for the rant but reading the news shouldn't be irritating. Note that I pay for Fairfax and Guardian but like to read more widely.

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