At the end of December, 2012, that was little more than two years ago, I’d noticed “The Bar Thing,” which I would described as epidemic. Actually, it had been going on longer than that, just I finally put a note down.

I believed it’s when the Flickr brought Navigate and Explore online, which has been replaced with a bigger overlay bar, that made things worst. Flickr was not the only one, Meebo, StumbleUpon, and probably much more were doing the same.

1   topbar and overlay

There are a lot of websites uses bars, topbar and overlay bar mostly. topbar usually contains more important functions, such as top-level navigation links as well as the search box. Overlay bar usually, from my experience, is stuff trying to get your attention, hoping to get you to visit more pages. In other words, it’s a spam to me.

Google used to have a topbar that had links to some major services, but some time after August, 2013, it was removed and replaced with an “Apps” button next to your name. Ever since the bar was added, I saw more websites trying to mimic, not sure if Yahoo was one of them, but it still has a topbar, and an overlay bar.

2   Overlay is bad

I am okay with topbar as long as it doesn’t become overlay as you scroll down, and it’s fixed in page. Why overlay is bad? I have two good reasons:

  1. It blocks content underneath it.

    If it’s at top and about 2 lines, when you scroll down using PageDown, you will find two lines that hasn’t been display are being buried under the bar. That is if you want to use keyboard to read page by page, you are risking missing some contents if you don’t go scroll back up two lines every time you go down a page.

    It’s a fundamental design flaw and nowhere to go around it, however, if it’s not an overlay but a real topbar which doesn’t stay on top of the content, then there would be no such problem.

    Yes, mouse wheel to scroll wouldn’t have this problem since it’s slowly bit by bit, but if you are really reading and you want to minimize finger use, you would use keyboard. PageDown requires much less than rolling mouse wheel.

  2. Search hit underneath it.

    As I use Pentadactyl / search, I often find the hits being blocked by overlay bar which is a bottom overlay bar, when I press n to jump to next hit result.

    With Firefox Ctrl+F, the hit would be brought into middle of screen. But since I use Pentadactyl, I’d not want to bring up Firefox’s UI, would I?

    This is the most annoying issue when I am searching something in a page.

3   Final words

A workaround I am using is to hide the overlay bar, but if it contains site search box, that would be a problem.

I have a confession to make, very little of making the overlay bars might have been contributed by me. The most visited page of this blog, Stick div at top after scrolling definitely is for that purpose, and it’s got quite some views. I guess that I could blame myself for a little bit.

I hope people stop to really use their websites, not just to design them to make them look fancy. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel more an more people really don’t care what’s on page, they just scroll and close the page.

It’s the small thing counts the most, but we probably have too many small things these days, and nobody cares to give a thought about them, let alone actually use or read them.

Bar you inside the website.