News sites, can you at least stop nagging distant readers to get your local-update newsletters?

Posted on July 12, 2019 by robpegoraro

With my industry becalmed in its current horrid economic state, you’d expect news sites to strive to make new readers welcome. Instead, they keep resorting to clingy, creepy behavior that must send a large fraction of those new readers lunging for the back button.

I’m speaking, of course, of the giant sign-up-for-our-newsletter dialog that pops up as you’ve read a third or half of a story, encouraging you to get that site’s latest updates in your inbox.

This is dumb on strict user-experience grounds–at a minimum, you shouldn’t see this until you’ve read to the end of the story. Would you like NPR affiliates to run their pledge drives by sounding an air horn in the middle of Morning Edition and then asking for your money? No, you would not.

But the newsletter nag looks especially dumb when a local newspaper greets a distant reader with this interruption. The odds that I’m going to want daily updates about developments in Richmond, Buffalo (as seen above), or some other place where I do not live are just about zero. And the fact that I’m reading hundreds or thousands of miles away should be obvious to every one of these sites via basic Internet Protocol address geolocation.

I’m willing to click or tap those dialogs closed and keep reading, because I don’t want to sandbag the journalism business any further. But it’s hard to blame readers who instead respond by switching to the stripped-down reader-view option of Safari or Firefox. Or by running an ad blocker.

A Safari upgrade I like: accountability for resource-hogging pages

Posted on September 22, 2017 by robpegoraro

Apple is a few days away from shipping its next big update to its desktop operating system, but people running its current and previous macOS releases can already benefit from one of macOS High Sierra’s components.

Yes, I’m writing something nice about Safari for a change.

The browser that I’ve spent much of the past few years cursing at for its weak memory management and general inability to let me run the computer instead of the other way around got a welcome, pre-High Sierra update Tuesday.

The most talked-about feature in Safari 11.0 may have been its ability to automatically silence sites that without invitation play videos with audio on (yes, I know that includes some of my freelance clients), followed by its blocking of cross-site ad tracking. But the option I’m enjoying most at the moment is Safari 11’s ability–stashed in a new “Websites” tab of its preferences window–to open every page at a given site in the minimalist Reader view.

Where ad blockers are often clumsy and random, Reader can be an elegant weapon against sites that demand attention with junky ads and auto-playing media. It might also spare you from a particularly piggy page locking up your Mac with a demand for more memory than the system can allocate.

“Isn’t that the system’s damn job,” you say? Yes, it is. Fortunately, Safari 11 also now seems able to quash a site in the middle of a memory binge, to judge from the banner I saw atop a page advising me that Safari had reloaded it “because it was using significant memory.”

I’m not going to tell the Safari developers to kick back with a nice vacation – since this update, the browser has already forced a reboot when it somehow refused to restart or fully quit–only a week after I’d had to go through the same routine with Google’s Chrome. But at least I don’t feel like this app is conspiring against me.

Stop Twitter’s iOS app from opening links in Reader View (maybe…)

Posted on July 20, 2017 by robpegoraro

The Web pages people share in Twitter can look annoyingly bland and alike in Twitter’s iOS app. If so, it’s not your fault. But turning off the default setting you may have been opted into is your problem.

The issue here seems to be Twitter’s test, as reported by the Guardian in October, in having Twitter open links in Safari’s simplified if not style-starved Reader View. Sometimes, that’s great: The core content of a page snaps into view almost instantly, without the ads that wriggle into view and the junk links that pad out the page.

But in the weeks since I’ve seen this behavior return after I thought I’d opted out of it earlier, I’ve more often wished I could see the page without Apple’s abstraction. When Reader View isn’t making pages look identical, with the same boring fonts, it hides some of their content–Techmeme’s leaderboard lists, for instance, don’t even appear in Reader View.

And if you want advertising-supported sites you like to make a little money off your attention, Reader View is not your friend or theirs: Most ads don’t appear in this perspective.

I’m supposed to disable Reader View for a page by tapping the black rectangle at the left of Safari’s address bar, but too often, that only leads to the page reloading in Reader View seconds later.

You can stop this obnoxiousness, but it’s nowhere obvious. Open Twitter’s app, tap the silhouette icon at the bottom right to bring up your profile, tap the gear icon near the top right, and select “Settings and privacy.” See the heading for “Display and sound,” where you might expect to see a setting governing how pages appear? Ignore it and instead tap “Accessibility.”

Now scroll down–never mind that the disappearing scroll bars in iOS might suggest there’s nothing more to fuss with there. You should now see a slider control labeled “Open links in Reader View”; tap that to end this behavior.

Unless you can’t. After I tweeted out a version of this advice, a reader replied that he didn’t see any such option in his own copy of the app. Maybe his running a beta version of iOS 11 explains that? Or maybe he’s been opted into a more diabolical version of whatever test I got sucked into? I can’t tell you for sure, since Twitter PR has not yet answered the query I sent in Thursday morning. If you have relevant testimony, I welcome it in the comments.