Can any UX people illuminate the modern popularity of these things? I find them very distracting, and typically unusable. When I'm scrolling down the page, the function I'm performing is consumption of content. With a sidebar there begging me to click away (or worse, display ads and social media junk), it considerably reduces my desire to perform this function. It just reminds me of the Java applets in 1996 for sidebar buttons.
I think there is value in these types of sticky sidebars when they are used in the correct way. The correct way is when the sticky sidebar is a key of some sort. Links that jump around the current article for quick jumping. However, I agree, I can't stand when sites use these for ads or social media junk.
That's an excellent point. The sidebar on railstutorial.org is quite functional, and aside from some bright social icons not very distracting. I think that is the perfect use case for a sticky sidebar, navigation or additional information related to the actual body text. I guess I just see it used more as a new sidebar, basically emulating what framesets did for us back in the 90s.
I agree that it all comes down to usage and content of the site. If the developer of the site uses something like this correctly to present always present useful information or links to the user, then they're great additions.
It's very useful for top-level navigation when using the "infinite scrolling" that seems to be so popular these days. It makes it so you don't have to scroll all the way back up when you're 10 pages deep.
not so sure about the "Finally" claim. been using https://github.com/terkel/jquery-floating-widget for a while, it also has the ability to stop floating when past a certain container's bottom edge. it's also much lighter weight.
That page feels extremely sluggish when scrolling... I don't think I'm ever going to use this. And yes I'm using a browser with hardware acceleration intentionally disabled to simulate slower computers.
"The problem with a simply "fixed" positioned element is that it doesn't react well to a scroll or window resize. In many cases the sidebar will overlap elements such as the footer or content area. Generally this is not the intended effect."