Snap Preview Anywhere Hurting User’s Web Experience
Snap.com is running a new service, Snap Preview Anywhere. It allows websites to have the links on their site show a preview of the linked site in a floating window. I have stumbled across several sites that are using this technology, and I find it distracting. I’m reading through a page, I scroll down and the mouse randomly ends up over a link. Poof! a pop-up window appears, and I’m looking at the preview of that linked page. It is quite distracting, partially because the preview is slow to load, and partially because something is happening on the web page that I’m not expecting. I’m not expecting anything because I’m not doing anything to cause something to happen. Simply moving my mouse and not clicking should not cause something to happen. The behavior is very similar to pop-up ads.
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December 29th, 2006 at 10:58 am
What the…crap!!! I did not install this (can’t install anything) and agree totally with you. I HATE this feature on all websites I visit. It slows things down and covers what I’m reading when my mouse just happens to move over a link.
Guess who I’m going directly to to loudly complain?
December 29th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Hi Lorelle, glad to help. Lorelle’s followup is at WordPress.com, Please Stop Using Snap Preview.
January 3rd, 2007 at 6:41 am
[...] Planet Mike, Lorelle, Joshua Kaufman, Sean P Aune Add to social bookmarks:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
January 13th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
[...] Maybe it’s just because I haven’t used Internet Explorer to browse the web for such a long time, but I haven’t encountered anything as annoying as Snap Preview for… well, quite a long time . The Lorelle on WordPress blog does quite a good job of covering (most of) the reasons why I hate it. [...]
January 29th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
[...] I’m not the only one who has noticed this. Here is one statement against the use of Snap Preview Anywhere, making some very good points about how it can inhibit the accessibility of the site for handicapped individuals. Here’s another complaint against it. [...]
February 23rd, 2007 at 4:48 am
absolutely hate it as well. errgh.
i just added spa.snap.com to my hosts file, so thats bye bye snap.
127.0.0.1 spa.snap.com