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Annoying “Feature”
Posted by isecore on October 4th, 2008
This is a minor gripe, but I’m getting tired of how most of the major swedish news-outlets today have forced reloads of their sites every now and then. DN, SvD, Idg… they all do it.
You’re sitting there, semi-happily browsing their page and then suddenly it reloads, you’ve lost your place in the page and you’re back at the top. Sure, I understand they think this is a neat way to always make sure the viewer is viewing the latest possible version of their page. Except it’s not, it’s just really annoying.
It’s the equivalent of reading the paper, and suddenly finding that someone has yanked it out of your hands, refolded it and placed it on the table in front of you. All within a split second.
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October 4th, 2008 at 14:34
Couldn’t agree with you more!
October 4th, 2008 at 16:39
Every reload is a set of new set of registered ad impressions for the site owner. And with impressions still being a common way of selling ads, the reloads is probably more about earning more money than serving the latest version. Pages with articles that are 2 months old are also reloading like this, and it would be an enormous waste of resources and bandwidth if it didn’t pay off in some way.
It is actually a bit like you get a free magazine on the street, and the person who gave it to you suddenly takes it back, throws it away and gives you another copy of the magazine. Folded, of course. That makes it all even more annoying!
Luckily, there are tools that are able to turn off automatic reloads. I think that the web developer toolbar for Firefox can do it as well, atleast for meta redirects and javascripts.
October 4th, 2008 at 23:05
try installing “no script” extension in firefox.. removes alot of annoying “features” of pages.
October 5th, 2008 at 04:10
Yes, I’m already running the noscript-extension. And I’ve killed off HTML-refreshes and such. But my opinion is still valid - this is an annoying feature that shouldn’t be needed. Installing extensions is a workaround, the problem still exists for other users.
I do think though that Andreas is perfectly right in the reason why newspapers implement this retarded function.