I could be wrong, but my simple guess is that it's become widespread in LLM-generated websites partly because of Anthropic's own style guides getting adopted through Claude-bundled skills and such.
“Motion: Use animations for effects and micro-interactions. Prioritize CSS-only solutions for HTML. Use Motion library for React when available. Focus on high-impact moments: one well-orchestrated page load with staggered reveals (animation-delay) creates more delight than scattered micro-interactions. Use scroll-triggering and hover states that surprise.”
ARE YOU NOT DELIGHTED?
I assume the study results would be the same if they were repeated using fade scrolls.
So for example on claude's website I get no animations, pretty good QoL improvement. Now webdevs HONORING prefers-reduced motion, that can vary.
15 years ago it did look very polished, boutique, professional. Now that it's a module everyone can do, everyone literally does it for every module.
Also there's tailwind that likely has a module for all the modules in webflow.
Because it is.
For sites with dynamic content (social media, news, etc.), it doesn't happen.
But commercial sites trying to convince you to use their product, they're incredibly common. It's not always a fade in exactly like this site does it. Sometimes it's content sliding in from the side.
It's incredibly pervasive on SaaS marketing pages.
That would explain my ignorance of it - such sites are in the bottom negligible percentage of sites which i might accidentally visit but never purposely do.
Maybe it's too subtle to notice.
Edit: on odeva.nl
This site is intentionally doing it very poorly to make a point. Really, the takeaway should be don't do things poorly. But that's kind of obvious.
I've seen it quite a lot, but apparently I've never seen it done well. It's a very annoying effect that chases me away from the site using it.
This becomes worse for people who just skim content, re-read the text, or want to quickly scroll to a specific place in text
<img loading="lazy" src="image.jpg" alt="..." />It's always awful. This site is exagerated in degree, but in kind it's merely on the scale of awful.
Computers should not waste my time. Even if eyes are 10ms faster than the awful fade, if a million people see it, that's almost three hours of human life down the drain.
And when scrolling fast, or far, it's not uncommon to have it waste a second of human time. A million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".
It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time.
The web is already slow. No need to deliberately spend effort to make it even slower.
And this is what people have become way, WAY too tolerant of. The deliberate theft of customers' time. While this is obviously a very minor example, there are lots and lots of others that aren't.
I’m a fast scroller and skimmer. Info scroll down and the text is not there I’ll just assume that the site is shot and close it. Ain’t nobody got 200ms to wait for a god damn fade in when there’s an infinite amount of sites out there to discover.
I mean, you might not like it, and that's fair and understandable, but is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.
But yes, in fact if this page succeeds then it's wasting human life on things as productive as spam phone calls. People have solved the latter by simply not answering for unknown numbers.
Not sure what you mean by "fatalistic". To the point where I'm not sure that's the word you mean. It's fatalistic as in fate. Maybe you mean morbid?
Standing in line at the DMV is also all "counting flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all"? But even at the DMV it's (hopefully) not done maliciously.
> cosmetic inconveniences
Sometimes things suck. That's not remotely as frustrating as knowing that someone went out of their way to make your life worse.
> is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.
If we capped all laptop CPUs to 600MHz, would it really be that big of a deal? Maybe they did it because of the acoustic preference of not needing to spin the fans as much, and therefore you are not allowed faster CPUs?
This is the wrong conclusion. The amount of work that can be accomplished summing one second from 38 million people is approximately zero - much different from stealing 1 day from 38 people or 1 hour from 912.
Apple uses it for their various pages, and it is legitimately annoying-
Tesla is a fan as well-
Occasionally sites use lazy loaded images, and do a "fade in" effect when they're actually loaded. Nothing wrong with that particular use.
Love how that page takes almost 10 seconds to load for the first time on a 200Mbps connection
It goes where you click in the water area