What kills me is that the only app that I actually engage with ads is an app that has a voluntary button to see ads to support the developer. You click the 'watch ad' button, you watch a 15 second ad, or see a banner ad, and then return to the app when you close the screen.

The app asks once per month if I would consider seeing an ad to support the developer. I usually watch one ad a day, as a rule, because it's the best way to do this. I've clicked on those ads, and have actually made purchases from those ads (it was for a product I was already researching and probably going to buy, but I clicked through the ad when I finally purchased it).

More apps need that level of respect for their users' time.

The god damned cookie consent popups do this. The "Decline" buttons are small and grey, the "Accept all and save" are big and green. They'd show empty checkboxes/iOS-style sliders at the off position that show that you won't be getting non-essential cookies, of course when you click "Accept all" these settings get overridden.

Not only an ad problem, but the sliders reminded me of a really bad UI feature I see everywhere: ambiguous highlighting when there are only two options.

I find some of the sliders for on/off are impossible to read. You can't work out what is on or off.

Windows 3.11 / 95 UI seems such a good idea by comparison to today's UIs - checkboxes with obvious tick marks or X marks in them, radio buttons, buttons that look like actual buttons, scrollbars you can see without having to flail the mouse around just for them to appear, scrollbars that go the right way when you use the mouse wheel (ok that was Windows 98), maximise buttons that actually maximised a window without having to hold alt like on macOS these days...

My dad is colorblind, and the red off/green on looks the same to him; the slight shadow showing the side the toggle is on often isn't dark enough to be obvious, especially when someone gets cute and makes the slider pill-style (the button part takes up exactly half the space, with a vertical line down the middle). I expect this to be less common with mobile OS downtime features that encourage users to get off their screens by going grayscale.

I don't know why everybody went to a flat design. Seriously Apple should have stuck with their it looks like things design.

> Also very small, 1-2 pixel "X" so literally one pixel off and you've opened the ad

Fact check. You cannot make an X with anything less than 3 pixels. ;)

An overlay that covers the whole area opening an add onClick. After some time the overlay is added again (incredibly annoying for video players you might want to pause)

If your ad blocker can't deal with these, set z-index on the main content with a userstyle, so it stays on top. Then you might also want to use a css style to just make everything else invisible:

``` *:not(.videoContainer){ background-color: black!important; color: black!important; } img { display:none!important; } ```

> 1-2 pixel "X"

An x requires at least 3×3 pixels.

Not if it's rendered on subpixels :).

Actually the minimum number of pixels to render a close box is three times the number of close boxes (ie. 3x3 for 1 close box). Any fewer pixels will not allow a functional close box to be reconstructed. This is referered to as the 'Nah-quist limit'.