Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Web dialogs
Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 7 years (2020–2026), in 13 threads.
People raised many different problems with Web dialogs, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 13 complaints
- Sticky overlays cover content and make pages unreadable, with no way to scroll past them2026-08-05
- Close icons are deliberately low contrast, making popups hard to dismiss2026-03-16
- Pop-ups like newsletter, GDPR and install-app prompts interrupt reading, especially on e-ink2025-04-16
- Sticky headers and footers eat window height and modals obstruct content2023-02-12
- Building accessible dialogs on websites is hard to get right2022-12-14
- Pages bury content under soft paywalls, adblock nags, popups and slow JS-heavy loading2022-11-24
- Closing a dialog saves changes with no way to tell OK from Cancel, and accidental swipes edit documents irreversibly2022-11-23
- Users must dismiss cookie banner, newsletter popup and continue-reading button before reading2022-09-23
- Full-page popup blocks reading after ads; must scroll past ads first2022-09-17
- Can't tell whether Cancel in the popup cancels the action or the cancel2022-04-15
- Keyboard focus not set on first option, forcing mouse or many tabs to choose2021-10-18
- Esc used to cancel IME input also closes the dialog, so double-tapping Esc accidentally closes it2021-04-09
- Pop-ups and modals are invasive and unhelpful, so people find them annoying2020-01-22