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Should load much slower.

Also, where is the unrelated autoplaying video that will unmute if you actually click it, that follows your scrolling and only becomes smaller when you dismiss it? Plus, it should probably have text that cuts off letting you know you can have access for just $10/month.

Plus, isn't this website undissmissably "better in the app" after a few minutes of attempting to use it on a phone? Where's that at?

edit: Oh shoot! I forgot, too. This modal needs to also ensure there is absolutely no way to scroll. If you could scroll you might be able to accidentally get to the address bar of your browser to fix the URL to xcancel or even close the page, which isn't using the app as you are intended to do.

Also, it doesn't attempt to hijack the back button to give me stuff I clearly wanted to see before I leave the page.

A lot of work left to do here before it's a "real" website. Although, it has about as much substance as the average website so far, so good work on that.

> Plus, isn't this website undissmissably "better in the app" after a few minutes of attempting to use it on a phone? Where's that at?

This is the most annoying thing on the internet. There’s a site I’d like to use, but “try the app” takes up the entire page (and appears to be impossible to dismiss?). Actually, is there a way to permanently request the desktop site for all future visits to a domain on iOS? There is no reason to visit this full-page app advertisement.

Yeah. No spinners. No pulsing gray placeholders that sit there for minutes and then shift the content when they load. No 10GB video playing in the background. My laptop didn't even get hot or spin up the fans when I viewed this page.
Where are the third-party ads that interrupt the content I wasn’t able to read? And the popover telling me about singles on my area? Why haven’t I been offered a subscription to a newsletter so I can receive daily updates and offers to pay for additional services?

You’re right. It’s a good start, but there’s still a lot to do.

Also needs a carousel that cycles in approximately 2/3 the time it takes me to read the item, with an arrow target small enough that I'm likely to miss the arrow and instead go to a random part of the page that I don't care about.
You forgot to mention condom^W Cloudflare between you and site. With "please tick checkbox to prove that you are a human" and "we add five minutes delay because you have old browser".
Feedback taken. Will ask ai agents to make improvements.
To be fair, this website was from 2020... To your point, the web has gotten significantly more annoying to use since then.
Wild that it is somehow worth it to stream video to every visitor on the hopes that it'll get them to stick around longer or see an ad in the video. That conversion number has to be crazy low.
I was about to say, by today's standards this site is actually fairly usable. That is depressing.
I started an e-commerce brand on a Shopify site. I swore to myself I would never put up one of those stupid things that pops up "Someone bought X product an hour ago!" messages in the corner of the screen.

I ended up trying it. Boosted conversion rate meaningfully. Worth the price I pay in mild self-loathing.

Chesterton's popup, I guess.

Loaded way too fast and is way too responsive.

Also when I checked NoScript, it's only loading js from lxe.github.io

I expect there to be at minimum 8 domains, but often 12-18.

I'm filing a bug report...

Steps to reproduce: Open terminal emulator and type;

$ w3m https://lxe.github.io/everywebsite/

I can read the same content as I can read in Firefox.

What I expected to happen: See content similar to the following;

Update your browser Your browser isn't supported any more. To continue your search, upgrade to a recent version. Learn more

Needs a Google login popup, required for any site that there is no reason at all to have an account with.
Some graybeard advice - Any time you need to use a website that doesn't require active cognitive interaction - click the button in your browser that enables Reader View to get the content and strip out everything else. It's not perfect, but it makes the web more usable (especially on mobile, my goodness it's gotten bad).

Firefox also has an extension called "Auto Reader View" in which you can set sites to automatically change to that mode.

The cookie thing, I assume it's EU-only, is an example of the EU policy making process being fundamentally broken in some way. If you create a flawed policy and don't fix it many years after it's very visibly obvious that it's a bad policy, something is really wrong.
That "In case you're not aware, there's COVID-19 happening" banner isn't nearly tall nor yellow enough. Given a 6-inch-tall screen, the proper layout would be:

  +-----------------+
  |2" of vestigial  |
  |COVID messaging  |
  +-----------------+
  |1.5" of actual   |
  | content         |
  +-----------------+
  |2.5 of EU        |
  |  cookie banner  |
  +-----------------+
A local utility took it even further during COVID:

  +---------------------+
  |2" of COVID messaging|
  +---------------------+
  |1" of undismissable  |
  | "our app is gone;   |
  | use the mobile site |
  | that you're on now" |
  +---------------------+
  |0.5" of content      |
  +---------------------+
  |2.5" of EU cookie    |
  | banner, despite     |
  | being a US-only corp|
  +---------------------+
So many websites do popups and it feels so anti-user. Maybe I get unusually annoyed, but I do not need a Gemini popup ad in Google Docs. Just let me do what I came to the website to do!
Needs to autoplay a video which when dismissed just moves to another window and continues playing. With sound.
I like it. Reminds me of this: https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
it's funny sometimes there will be an archived espn.com (like this https://proxy.espn.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/030418) and it's hard to argue the web was not better like this, i.e. readable
As feedback, you made that popup way too clean and easy to close. That’s not how it works in reality. You need to make the background transparent and the X so small it’s technically impossible to hit. Also think about adding an ad and a timer and move the popup slightly after N ms so that the user always hits the ad.
It's a bit 2025. Needs a scroll hijack background animation and cursor effects to be up to date for 2026
inaccurate, i don't have to go three screens deep into a modal to choose only necessary cookies
I made a game about this. You can play it if you want to feel annoyed.

https://termsandconditions.game

No endless scroll? What the hell am I supposed do I do with my mouse wheel?? Useless!
I think the cookie layer is missing the point.

I mean, it should say something like, 'Sure thing, we don't just use cookies for our servers, but to track you through half the internet, to know exactly what you want even before you know it. Please feel free to accept it or piss off.'

I don't like those lawyers either, but they are not the primary problem. The problems are tracking systems that don't just track you across one website but across multiple sites, like those deployed by Google and Facebook. And since Cambridge Analytica, we know that those are not just hypothetical scenarios and that they actually have an impact on elections and where our society is heading.

Serious answer:

Bootstrap.

That framework did more damage to web design than any other framework. Yeah, its nice that you can spin up a page in a second that looks like every other page on the internet, wait a minute...

Technical answer:

CSS

It was a nice idea, and it sure beat hand-designing each and every page (wait a second, weren't/aren't we doing that all over again?).

It did/does too much, and was mostly in lieu of a common repository of UI stuff, so people found One Way that it would work reasonably well on most browsers/devices, and so bootstrap was born...

Any web dev reading these comments and understanding what the comments express, should know: If you have built any of these dark patterns and anti-features, the annoyance and loathing expressed here is what you are responsible for, and this is how you made people feel about the website you took part in building. By implementing such stuff, you are personally part of the responsible group of people for making this crap. You personally have managed to make this planet a worse place and make your website shit. Given that these days basically 95% or more of websites push this shit, it is safe to assume, that there are many of such web devs in our midst, who are responsible. Congratulations for ruining the web.
I wasn't asked for my location, notifications, camera permissions or to log in. This is, regrettably, still better than most recipe websites I visit.
Yeah. I've written about this a few times, with some suggestions for how to make it marginally less miserable to visit a website:

"Take back your web browser screen space with Kill Sticky" https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...

"Quick Tips For Making The Internet Suck Less" https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/08/01/tips-for-making-th...

"Web browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups" https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/12/31/web-browsers-have-...

Yea , thank u , I really despite those websites of current web, much JS, colors, much images and animations with mouse, and million fonts , rounded buttons and everything is rounded and "modern" and slow and bloated why cant have we simple websites, small coherent nice color palette to just read and know the needed info ? hackernews is extremely good example suckless: https://suckless.org/sucks/web/ is another brilliant example
For my current project, I tried going with a non-traditional style I personally liked, I call it "Soft Neo Brutalism". You can see it at: http://www.frost-e.com

I generally wanted web 1.0 simplicity, lots of contrast, but also a soft gentle colours and modern vibe. I also have a general design for use in dashboards/apps etc: https://frost-e.com/design-system/

Even my back button was hijacked for a second. Nice attention to detail!
How will the poor analytics companies pay their poor salaries? And how will people be able to know to advertise to me about a pair of shorts I looked up last month??
How hard could it be to write a greasemonkey script that will send the current html/Javascript from hell to a LLM with a prompt that will ask you which of the detected annoying elements you want to remove, and then will create and install another GM script that is removing those elements from this site, and also invent finglonger as a side effect. A man can dream, though. A man can dream.
I made this 6 years ago but it still applies today.
I may be skeptical, so take this with a grain of salt. The transformation happened when someone decided to stop being UI designer, to become UX designer. That wasn't enough, so they came up with XD - experience design. At every step of the way, they introduced more lofty goals for the design to justify the increased importance of themselves.
Let's not forget the generic images using either corporate memphis or AI. Or the lazy loading that makes it impossible to reach the footer. Or in some cases, numerous videos and animations that have no purpose other than looking flashy, along with a big slideshow/carousel at the top.
Not true.

The web is more than blogspam, SaaS, the most desperate cases of ecommerce, and the web versions of legacy newspapers/magazines.

Yea but do you guys remember when we actually needed pop up blockers to avoid having a site spawn like 10 new windows behind the current one, and tabs didn’t really exist yet, and the popups had adult content and sometimes they autoplayed sound/video? Like, internet explorer 6 era? Sometimes I miss those days
A while back I realized that it was just the browser keeping me on screen when I didn't want to be. I switched to the purely native Safari app on my phone, from a highly customized ad blocking browser, with lots of content filtering. My screen time dropped from like 2 hours a day to like 10 minutes.
I don't see any answers here with a link to best practices or a grading system or something promoting clean websites. What can be done in this space?

You get things rating accessibility, methodologies for building apps but nothing about standards for website quality?

We've got the stupid chat bubble at the bottom.

We didn't want it, it's like a megabyte of JavaScript. It's some third party service corporate forced on us.

I have to imagine a lot of websites are in the same boat, where they're just add crap they don't want to add by higher ups.

Answer: ads as the main business model running the web since 25 years ago and us accepting the convenience of 'free'.

It turns out everything has a price, and in more recent times we started noticing that our time, attention and intelligence not being insulted also has value.

Somehow the clicking around reminded me of Windows RG. Go check this old relic if you have never seen it: https://www.jamesweb.co.uk/windowsrg . Turn the volume up!
(2019) *

* according to the copyright notice, although, going by the mention of Covid, it could also be 2020?