I thought the article mentioned this, but there's a user preference to turn that off ("Disable stickyness").
I like the solution of not showing the navbar unless the user scrolls up.
IMO, fixed navbars are almost as bad as popups.
Oh man, I've gotta strongly disagree with this. To me, those are just distracting and in practice often end up being fidgety. For tall webpages I think an easy and simple alternative is having a link like <a href="#">top</a> at the bottom of the document or wherever it makes sense. Unfortunately it seems like many designers don't really go for easy and simple.
Plus the "show on scroll up" bars have the advantage of making it easy to access the top navigation without losing your place on the page, which is useful if you just want to open a link from the top bar in a new tab or quickly check your notifications or something.
In this case, I am utterly indifferent to Stack Overflow's being fixed. At least it's not going to surprise me.
Absolutely not. Bloomberg does this; it just means the "scroll up" feature is broken. You try to scroll up, and you get the navbar instead of the text you were trying to scroll to. If you're trying to add a feature that infuriates visitors several times over for every page of yours they view, then sure. If you don't want that, don't have stealth navbars.
Now there's just a bar I'm ignoring that's obscuring part of the useful information.
>“When I come here I’m on a mission; I don’t care about the rest.”
>“You’re only there for 1 reason: to find the answer to your question.”
>“From my point of view, nothing above the question title exists.”
>“I scroll down and read the question.”
People google a question, click on a Stack Overflow link, get their answer, close the tab. It works perfectly. Just not for SO, who want you to stay on the site after learning the answer.
The whole blog post is Stack Overflow trying to justify them making the UX worse on purpose.
You can't hold it against them that they want people to actually use their site.