Browser Hijacking

When is your browser hijacked, and when is the webmaster being helpful?

Over this last week or so I’ve been involved in quite an argument – and it all revolves around what some people refer to as “Browser Hijacking” – the technique of automatically re-sizing a visitor’s browser window to dimensions the Web designer has chosen.

I can see both sides of the story, to be truthful. I’m unhappy about these Web sites that size your browser window to within a pixel or so of the maximum without maximising the window itself, although given that my own browser window is often re-sized to suit the Web site I’m on at the time, it’s not all that onerous.

By the same token, if there’s a “fit your window to this site” button, I’m as likely as not to click on it – that way, I’m seeing the site the way its designer intended it to be. At the end of the day, I suppose I’m not that precious about it. Perhaps that comes from having a desktop resolution of 1600x1200 pixels, and being used to constantly re-sizing windows in all sorts of applications.

I’m not so sure about how I’d feel if I was running at 800x600 all the time – I rather expect that I’d have every window maximised anyway, so an awful lot of this just wouldn’t affect me.

Anyway, what really got to me was the attitude of the people that disagreed with “browser hijacking”. They were, in truth, extremely vehement and some were gratuitously rude, and decided to take out their frustrations on me. They opined that they’d never, ever go back to a site that re-sized their browser, or, indeed, did anything else they didn’t agree with.

That list seemed endless, and included any site with Flash on it or Shockwave, sites on which the text wasn’t re-sizable to suit them, sites which spawned exit consoles (not my favourite, I’ll admit), sites with fixed-width tables  - indeed, it seems any site with any design features at all.

Confused

Now, this confuses me. I surf for two main reasons – one is for enjoyment, and the other is for research. I like things that look nice – and if someone has gone to some lengths to make their site look attractive, applied some thought to colours, fonts etc, I tend to appreciate that.

What I’m not sure I’m all that keen on reading a site that’s all courier, no pictures and has no design to it at all – it’s boring, basically.

Yet, from what these people were saying, that’s exactly what they’re after! Plain text Web-sites? Ooer!

I’d be interested to know how you feel – I’d love to get a feel for how real people feel about this.

Does an automatic re-size of your browser window annoy you?

Do pop-ups annoy you?

Do you run permanently maximised anyway?

Do you prefer attractive design or text-only sites?

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David Dorn