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onmouseover events make the site difficult to navigate on a tablet


clubstew

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With the increasing use of tablets, popup menus relying on the onmouseover event make sites difficult to use. It would be great if the site instead popped open the menus using onclick, which would also require the main menu not include links but you could put the old links as the first item.

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This 'feature' was recently added to the site design to give it (the site) a fresh appeal.

I would doubt if they are likely to reverse those 'design improvements'.

 

What we really need are (what so many 'fresh and appealing' sites DO have)...user-selectable device specific versions.

 

Computer

 

Tablet

 

Smartphone

 

Small-scale cell phone

 

EDITED for speeling.

Edited by AZcachemeister
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This 'feature' was recently added to the site design to give it (the site) a fresh appeal.

I would doubt if they are likely to reverse those 'design improvements'.

 

What we really need are (what so many 'fresh and appealing' sites DO have)...user-selectable device specific versions.

 

Computer

 

Tablet

 

Smartphone

 

Small-scale cell phone

 

EDITED for speeling.

 

This is the real answer.

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Not just on tablets. Those menus are pretty intrusive on a PC as well.

 

It's a bogus trend that was probably all the rage among web-devs in 2010, and will hopefully end up in the what-were-they-thinking bin along with Clippy and Windows 8 well before 2015.

 

I agree, even on a reasonably high resolution PC screen using a conventional mouse the menus that suddenly take up chunks of my screen just because I ran my cursor somewhere near them bug the cr@p out of me. It's so unnecessary, it's not like people can't manage a single mouse click if they actually want the menu to open up.

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Not just on tablets. Those menus are pretty intrusive on a PC as well.

 

It's a bogus trend that was probably all the rage among web-devs in 2010, and will hopefully end up in the what-were-they-thinking bin along with Clippy and Windows 8 well before 2015.

 

I agree, even on a reasonably high resolution PC screen using a conventional mouse the menus that suddenly take up chunks of my screen just because I ran my cursor somewhere near them bug the cr@p out of me. It's so unnecessary, it's not like people can't manage a single mouse click if they actually want the menu to open up.

 

Add me to this according view. Sometimes it's just too darn much. You drag a pointer to a target and click, but a menu popped up as you passed and now you're loading a screen you do not mean to be on.

 

A couple years ago I voiced concern of too much javascripting making sites a pain to use and have watch Geocaching head in that direction. 'Pretty' don't not make for 'more user friendly'

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The worst aspect of this issue is the difficulty in opening the cache name bubble on maps when viewing on an iPad. With a bit of fiddling using a stylus, you can achieve the mouseover effect and get the bubble to appear but it is very hit or miss. This has been a forum dicussion/complaint previously. With the explosion in the popularity of tablets, Groundspeak should be trying to keep up with the changing needs of its members but addressing this issue doesn't seem to be on the To Do list.

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Not a big fan of drop-down menus. It took a good deal of experimenting to figure out that the only way to access the sub-menus on my Galaxy S3 was to zoom in to maximum, then very carefully touch only the black "down" arrow. If I accidentally touched any part of the text, I was taken to a page I didn't want to go to. Thanks so much.

 

Even on a PC, it's a PITA. Most people are using tabbed browsers now, which means you're moving your mouse to the top of the browser from time to time. And every time you do, the drop-down menus activate, often blocking the very link you were trying to click on. A well-behaved interface wouldn't activate the drop-down until the mouse had hovered over it for a half-second or so. It's a programing concept called "hover intent". It's not that hard to implement. I've even added it to some of my Greasemonkey scripts.

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On Android devices, you can simulate the mouse-over by touching and holding the link until the sub menu pops up.

You obviously didn't try it. The problem is that the heading are also links. So press-and-hold also brings up the extended option menu for processing links. The only way to prevent this is, as I said, press-and-hold the down arrow, which also activates the drop-down, but is not part of the link. It's an attempt to provide a default action for browsers that can't handle the mouse-over.

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On Android devices, you can simulate the mouse-over by touching and holding the link until the sub menu pops up.

You obviously didn't try it. The problem is that the heading are also links. So press-and-hold also brings up the extended option menu for processing links. The only way to prevent this is, as I said, press-and-hold the down arrow, which also activates the drop-down, but is not part of the link. It's an attempt to provide a default action for browsers that can't handle the mouse-over.

 

I use Chrome for Android and what I do is long-press the heading. Once the "Open in new tab, etc" screen pops up, I press the back button. This then allows me to click on one of the links in the drop-down menu. It's annoying, but it's the only workaround I've found.

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On Android devices, you can simulate the mouse-over by touching and holding the link until the sub menu pops up.

You obviously didn't try it. The problem is that the heading are also links. So press-and-hold also brings up the extended option menu for processing links. The only way to prevent this is, as I said, press-and-hold the down arrow, which also activates the drop-down, but is not part of the link. It's an attempt to provide a default action for browsers that can't handle the mouse-over.

Actually, I did try it. It is the way I use to navigate the menus on my smartphone. The trick is to release just as soon as the sub menu appears, before the context menu appears. If the context menu does pop up, you just need to click on the back button and the sub menu will still be opened.

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On Android devices, you can simulate the mouse-over by touching and holding the link until the sub menu pops up.

You obviously didn't try it. The problem is that the heading are also links. So press-and-hold also brings up the extended option menu for processing links. The only way to prevent this is, as I said, press-and-hold the down arrow, which also activates the drop-down, but is not part of the link. It's an attempt to provide a default action for browsers that can't handle the mouse-over.

Actually, I did try it. It is the way I use to navigate the menus on my smartphone. The trick is to release just as soon as the sub menu appears, before the context menu appears. If the context menu does pop up, you just need to click on the back button and the sub menu will still be opened.

I was signing my mom up and noticed on her iPad that clicking on the menu does drop the menu down without navigating. The correct events are not being handled for Chrome and Internet Explorer the, it seems. These are both used more than Safari.

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