When websites attack – Pop-up pains

I’ve got a couple of annoyances when I browse websites on my phone. The first is the fact that some idiotic person working in Government decided that we should all get warned about cookies. Unfortunately there’s no set way to do this, so various websites have different ways of doing it.

Some use a pop-up, some use a little triangle in the corner, some have the message at the top whilst others have it at the bottom. Worse still, on a mobile device these messages can appear across the text and they become very difficult to agree to because that hurriedly-added cookie message was only really designed for the desktop. Luckily a lot of websites don’t bother with these daft warning messages any more, but a lot of mainstream sites still do and it’s badly implemented, which is a shame because it wrecks the experience.

However, there’s a second annoyance, and it’s something a lot of website creators do. You know the deal, you visit your favourite newspaper website, find the incredibly annoying cookie message, click that, then you start reading the story and BLAM! A message pops up to tell you about their whizzy mobile app.

You don’t want it, you just want to read the story, but the newspaper has spent thousands building an app for both Android and iPhone (perhaps even Windows Phone and BlackBerry) and you WILL KNOW ABOUT IT. For you there’s now a website called “I don’t want your f*****g app” and, if you visit it, it’ll obviously have a bit of swearing in it. It houses a collection of pop-ups and other messages that “interrupt the user flow” and annoy the heck out of us. There’s a couple below, including the LinkedIn site. Their mobile app, which I try and use sometimes, is pretty terrible…