Hover _anything_ sucks IMO. I have noticed a trend lately where the hover delay seems to be drastically reduced. This means that as I move my mouse around a page, I am constantly bombarded with hover popups that come and go. Quite often, these are right next to a top level thing that I want to click, so I then have to wait for the popup to disappear before I can click on my target.

Another reason hover-anything is bad is because it is totally inaccessible. Observe a 90 year old with poor vision or someone with shaky hands trying to precisely position a mouse cursor over a UI element, while hover-popups are animating all over the place. It's a disaster. Do screen readers even work on hover elements? Need to stop designing the web as if all of your users are healthy 25 year olds.

The most frustrating part of using Visual Studio Code for me is the hover/scroll behavior for error/warning messages in the code. You have to hover to view the error, and usually the message is out of the hover pane viewport at the bottom, below the type/value documentation. This would be fine, except for the fact that once you have scrolled to the bottom of the hover pane, further scroll events are applied to the code itself, so the hover pane scrolls out of focus and disappear. I spend an inordinate amount of time scrolling one notch at a time hoping for a glimpse of an error message.

I only have in-depth VS Code experience writing Go with gopls so maybe this is a very niche issue but it’s so frustrating seeing so much wasted effort go into making and using and solving the weird inconsistencies of hover-based UI elements. The inevitable mess of hacky state management is an invented problem - the cursor should only affect state when buttons are pressed. I miss Plan 9.

The web interface to Amazon Prime videos is basically unusable because of the many hover behaviors they've added.

Hover states also make the Netflix website annoying.

Right! When I’m just scrolling through the list I don’t need an autoplay kicking off just because I happened to rest my mouse there.

Netflix is one of those sites where I find it hard to imagine that its designers ever tried to use it. It’s maddening.

Thankfully after much griping, Netflix did add an option to disable this in your profile settings.

That it's the default behaviour is still mind boggling.

I feel like they reduced the delay in an attempt to increase usability. It's tough to slough through all the gatekeepers to get rid of something like the menu styling in a web app. You might get buy in across the team and then a key stakeholder goes on a diatribe of why they think we should keep it and then everyone else runs out of energy trying to counter every one of the rationales. The people fighting for change get tired and pick another battle.

Utterly egregious example right here: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hover?s=ts

I'm always accidentally triggering the gigantic hover menu. So annoying.

I thought I was the only one. They boil my piss.

I’m not sure which is the more annoying aesthetic:

- mousing across the screen and accidentally passing over an item that on-hovers a giant div in front of what you were trying to access

- expecting a click to expand and click, but it hovers, and now you’ve clicked, so you’re going to some random page you didn’t intend to

Ok, I can go about my weekend now that this is off my chest.

:)

> mousing across the screen and accidentally passing over an item that on-hovers a giant div in front of what you were trying to access

Like every link in Wikipedia. The preview feature is just awful.

Opinions may differ.

I for my part love the Wikipedia preview hovers!

I actually don't even understand what could be perceived bad about them. Are people really moving the mouse cursor randomly around the screen without having conscious control of their hand movements? (I understand that this could be true in case of some medical condition like Parkinson's disease but not a general issue at all). Don't want to sound offensive; honest question.

When navigating, I of course pay close attention to where my cursor is. When I scroll to read through lots of text, I'm not moving the mouse cursor randomly around the screen, but I'm also not paying attention to where it is because scrolling up/down behaves the same regardless of where the cursor happens to be. On a site like Wikipedia, this means that my cursor can happen to trigger a preview hover that covers the very text I'm trying to read. Even if it's in a different spot, the movement is enough to be annoyingly distracting and often means I lose my place.

I love that feature. If you don't, it's literally 2 clicks to disable. Come on.

Personally I really like Wikipedia's preview feature. It makes it easy for me to decide if a link is worth following. The German language version does not have it, and whenever I use that one I quickly start to miss it.

Especially when the tree is deep and you have to trace a narrow path to your option. It's like the Polus Maze task.

God forbid your cursor leaves the third hover menu and it all vanishes before your eyes.

If you really must have hover-based nested menus in a web app, you can at least use the transition controls so a momentary loss of hover doesn’t immediately hide the whole menu again. Sadly, this technique doesn’t seem to be widely known and a lot of sites aren’t using it, which increases unnecessary frustration for users. :-(

I don't really like hover menus, but I don't find them to be the worst thing about "modern" "design". That would be topbars that disappear when scrolling down and then reappear if you scroll up, thus preventing you from seeing the content you just scrolled up to look at.

>That would be topbars that disappear when scrolling down and then reappear if you scroll up

This is close to my biggest pet peeve on the internet. Fortunately, the "kill sticky" bookmarklet[0] gets rid of those as well as other fixed elements on the page. Works on iOS too.

[0]https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/