[Zelphyr]

There should be a Developers Pledge: I, [state your name], hereby agree upon pain of death to never do things like force smooth scrolling, override scroll speed, implement a header that bounces based on scroll direction, etc...

[Xelbair]

>override scroll speed

if anyone does that I'll find that person and kill them with dull spoon.

There is nothing more infuriating than that little thing - why would even anyone do that? what's the use case? why waste dev time on that?

[hirako2000]

It's usually not dev, a product guy came up with a stupid idea with enough cash in hand, dev often oblige and for sure always find a way.

[jjp]

And the product guy did it because a sales team came in and said without load of color and animation then we won't be able to sell the product.

And the sales guy did it because a prospect said we really like all the features and the price but your product doesn't have as much color and animation as Acme Inc's product.

And the prospect did it because they actually prefer Acme Inc's product but they don't like Acme Inc's price so if they are going to have to go with the second choice product then let's get something done about the colors/animation before we close the sale.

And then we have the product guy coming back and working out what is the least or least worst thing we can do to remove the sales resistance, close out the sale and have everybody paid.

[beaconstudios]

what a rare treat on HN, some actual understanding of systemic causality rather than glib dismissals of the "obvious bad guy" in the scenario.

[ryanlol]

I doubt the product guys even know what smooth scrolling is.

[sitkack]

AirBnB does all of these things and breaks assets by caching corrupted downloads, as well as having gigantic, drive a fleet of rickshaws through a chasm of race conditions. I get ptsd from the anger management problems I’ll have in future when I think about using their software. Even now, I need to stop, it hurts.

AirBnB web team, if you read this. Fire your boss, their boss and then remove the org from your resume as you do a year or two traveling the world. Hopefully booking rooms by walking up and saying, ‘this places looks nice, do you have a room available?’

[bluGill]

The first time it sounds interesting, and until you try it in the real world you don't know for sure if it is a good idea or not. (some things that seemed like bad ideas have turned out really good - though that is somewhat rare it happens enough that trying something once is excusable). Trying it a second time though is generally stupid (unless you can come up with a significant twist that changes whatever made it bad the first time)

[pjc50]

Also: never override the pinch-zoom. This should be an automatic accessibility failure unless your site actually is a full-screen zoomable map or similar.

[trickstra]

... never add falling snowflakes effect during Christmas.

[eeZah7Ux]

There should be a way to prevent it by default in browsers.

[trickstra]

Only if it's created in the standardized way that browsers can disable. But if they go out of their way to catch mouse events and move the body of the page certain amount of pixels back or other crazy measures like that, then there is nothing a browser can and will ever be able to do about it.