I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the majority of users don't use spacebar for scrolling in 2019. Besides that (and the screen real estate), I'm not sure it's bad enough to need a bookmarklet to kill it.
The issue that was raised isn't just about the Spacebar. It's about scrolling by full-pages, so PgDown/PgUp would also have the same problem when a page has Sticky Headers.
I guess you can make the same argument that it's possible that people don't use PgDown/PgUp either, but that's besides the point, I think.
Generally, interfaces have a lot of features by default and when a particular interface breaks or removes them for no good reason (and I don't think I've ever seen a sticky header that could justify it), well that at least leaves a very bad impression. It's wasteful.
Same goes for links and buttons which are made to work only when clicking with the mouse, when by default they work with the keyboard too. Same goes for text which is set with a fixed width and necessitates a large minimum window width to read properly when by default text adjusts to a window's width. etc.
Nobody is average, so the world would suck if it only worked for the average.
For the record, I do scroll with the spacebar. I like to skim pages as quickly as possible, and PgDown is in different positions in different keyboards, so I just find spacebar to be super-accessible.
> that the majority of users don't use spacebar for scrolling in 2019
I don't use the spacebar for scrolling, too. But I'm pretty sure there are people who do; and those people care.
> I'm not sure it's bad enough to need a bookmarklet to kill it.
Well, it's bad enough for me that medium.com has a too-giant banner that covers over 30% of the viewport...
At the very least, it was bad enough that I submitted this page, even when I usually don't think that web-trends (like npm, 4MB of JS, 'modern' look of applications, etc...) are bad (opposed to the HN crowd).
It isn't bad enough to need a bookmarklet to kill it. It is worse. It's bad enough to make a greasemonkey script to kill all of them. Sticky headers also muck up the Page Down button quite a bit.
I guess you can make the same argument that it's possible that people don't use PgDown/PgUp either, but that's besides the point, I think.
Generally, interfaces have a lot of features by default and when a particular interface breaks or removes them for no good reason (and I don't think I've ever seen a sticky header that could justify it), well that at least leaves a very bad impression. It's wasteful.
Same goes for links and buttons which are made to work only when clicking with the mouse, when by default they work with the keyboard too. Same goes for text which is set with a fixed width and necessitates a large minimum window width to read properly when by default text adjusts to a window's width. etc.
Nobody is average, so the world would suck if it only worked for the average.
For the record, I do scroll with the spacebar. I like to skim pages as quickly as possible, and PgDown is in different positions in different keyboards, so I just find spacebar to be super-accessible.