<story><title>Kill Sticky Headers (2013)</title><url>https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vortico</author><text>Sticky headers make me feel claustrophobic, I don&amp;#x27;t know why. Regardless of my screen height (it could be a 30&amp;quot; monitor), it feels like something is &amp;quot;stuck&amp;quot; to my browser that wasn&amp;#x27;t before and makes me feel anxious.&lt;p&gt;Even without that feeling, sticky headers kill the feeling that I&amp;#x27;m moving through a viewport of a webpage. It makes your website look like it&amp;#x27;s not of the &amp;quot;webpage&amp;quot; medium that I&amp;#x27;ve been familiar with for 20 years. Humans have a very good eye for relative movement. The visual processing part of your brain considers movement &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; more contrasting than color. So a fixed header when you&amp;#x27;re scrolling at 1cm&amp;#x2F;second is visually equivalent to a big bar moving upward at 1cm&amp;#x2F;second while you&amp;#x27;re trying to read an article. It&amp;#x27;s hard &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; to pay attention to it. But navbars don&amp;#x27;t contain content, so they shouldn&amp;#x27;t steal attention from the page content.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pgcj_poster</author><text>Exactly. When I&amp;#x27;m using an application called a browser to view a document on the web, I don&amp;#x27;t want the document to try to become part of the chrome: that breaks the &amp;quot;web page&amp;quot; metaphor. There is a &lt;i&gt;very small&lt;/i&gt; subset of websites, such as Figma, that feel more like independent applications than web pages, and for those I get more annoyed by the presence of the browser chrome, for basically the same reason.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s worse, almost no sticky header has any useful items in it. Take StackOverflow as an example. It has a link to the homepage and a searchbar, in spite of the fact that many frequent StackOverflow users have never visited the homepage and never used the built-in search. The top of the screen is the most valuable part, because my head is usually above the screen, so it&amp;#x27;s more comfortable for my eyes to rest around the top of the viewport. So if you put something there, it had better be important.</text></comment>
<story><title>Kill Sticky Headers (2013)</title><url>https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vortico</author><text>Sticky headers make me feel claustrophobic, I don&amp;#x27;t know why. Regardless of my screen height (it could be a 30&amp;quot; monitor), it feels like something is &amp;quot;stuck&amp;quot; to my browser that wasn&amp;#x27;t before and makes me feel anxious.&lt;p&gt;Even without that feeling, sticky headers kill the feeling that I&amp;#x27;m moving through a viewport of a webpage. It makes your website look like it&amp;#x27;s not of the &amp;quot;webpage&amp;quot; medium that I&amp;#x27;ve been familiar with for 20 years. Humans have a very good eye for relative movement. The visual processing part of your brain considers movement &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; more contrasting than color. So a fixed header when you&amp;#x27;re scrolling at 1cm&amp;#x2F;second is visually equivalent to a big bar moving upward at 1cm&amp;#x2F;second while you&amp;#x27;re trying to read an article. It&amp;#x27;s hard &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; to pay attention to it. But navbars don&amp;#x27;t contain content, so they shouldn&amp;#x27;t steal attention from the page content.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baroffoos</author><text>I think the only time sticky headers are ever acceptable is when you need to regularly refer back to them. Long tables without sticky headers are the worst</text></comment>