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Preview On Hover
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New Comment
I don't like the fact that the preview doesn't disappear when I stop hovering. I find the preview visually jarring enough that I would prefer to spend most of my reading time without a spurious preview window. At the very least, there should be a way to manually close the preview. Otherwise I would want to avoid hovering over any links and to refresh when I do, which is a bad reading experience.
Can other people comment about the UX of preview on hover?
I dislike it because the pop-ups are often quite large, like on gwern.net, where they can completely block whatever it is I'm reading. Arbital-style tool-tips and the Wikipedia ones are borderline okay as they aren't too large, but I find that the visual contrast is often too jarring for me :/
It seems plausible to me that having hovers Off To The Side may be better than the current thing LW does. I do find that the jefftk.com hovers are... too far off to the side. I'd prefer them if they were basically just to the right of the main column.
(I also don't really mind them appearing in the main body, perhaps not surprising since I helped implement the LW ones, but it'd make sense to me if other people preferred them to-the-side. I think I generally find it less distracting to have the Right By The Hover when I deliberately moused over them, but if I'm just scrolling quickly it can sometimes be annoying. Though this might be solved by just implementing a slight delay to their appearance)
It's very tricky to make it convenient for most, without losing accessibility for some. Preferences and device capabilities vary by a whole lot, and unless you're going to do the work to detect or ask people, and then support multiple mechanisms, you are probably best off being as close to minimal and standard as possible.
My primary mechanism for reading branching sites/articles (those with multiple topics I want to follow) is to open a lot of tabs, then work forward through them, opening more in the process. Hover is convenient to give me a quick idea of whether it's worth opening a tab, but it's really inconvenient if it stays too long or slows me down when I already know I want the tab.
LW goes a bit too far toward this, for me. It's fine on desktop, where I have lots of screen real-estate and the mouse click/focus works to dismiss the popups/hovers pretty well. It kind of annoys me when middle-click or control-click don't work to bring up a new tab (for shortforms or some comment-notice links), but that's tolerable. On Chrome on iOS, at least, it's _very_ annoying. in order to long-press to get the "open in new tab" option, it brings up a window that obscures a lot of other items, and there's no obvious way on the small screen to dismiss the "hover" without changing the underlying view in some way.
I do find that the jefftk.com hovers are... too far off to the side. I'd prefer them if they were basically just to the right of the main column.
You're right, that's where they should go. I'll go mess with the CSS.
It looks like there used to be a plugin for this? https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-live-preview-links/ https://github.com/soderlind/wp-live-preview-links ? But visiting the demo page https://soderlind.no/wp-live-preview-links/ it doesn't seem to work anymore.
Preview on hover has stopped working for me. Has the feature been removed?
I'm on Firefox/Linux, and I use the Greater Wrong version of the site.
I've got uBlock Origin. The hover preview works in private/incognito mode, but not regular, even with uBlock turned off/uninstalled. For what it's worth, uBlock doesn't affect hover preview on Less Wrong, just Greater Wrong.
I'm positive issue is with Firefox, so I'll continue fiddling with the settings to see if anything helps.
which toggles previews on or off. Do they come back if you click on it?I don't think it matters that the link preview covers the content because the preview should be where your attention is when you're engaging with that feature. Now that it's fairly standard for the content section to take up the middle ~1/3 of the screen, there's plenty of empty space on both sides where the mouse cursor can be routinely kept out of the way. It's more useful to have the cursor near the scrollbar or browser UI most of the time anyway. In fact, it's optimal to keep the cursor in a set region of the screen when you aren't using it so you always know where it is. Accidentally triggering the preview window can be a useful indicator that the cursor is in the wrong place a sub-optimal resting position.
the preview should be where your attention is when you're engaging with that feature
I don't want to force users to engage with the feature if they don't want to, or keep their cursors in any particular place.
(nodding) I hear that. One more note: other than using the link text as the title of the preview, I don't see anything visually connecting the preview with the link. This makes the feature substantially less discoverable than the current solution, and it could potentially be confusing to have a seemingly random box suddenly appear on the side of the page for no immediately apparent reason if you accidentally hover over a link.
On Firefox/Windows, hovering over the link turns it purple, though I haven't *really* visited it. I'm not sure how to change it or if it matters, but I use the :visited pseudo-class often when browsing the web.
Weirdly, this isn't permanent: it goes away on refresh. So this isn't actually adding entries to your visited list?
