Do all the popups on Stack Overflow factor into the performance measurements? My last three visits I had a "welcome back ... blah blah blah" popup as well as the orange "you've got a badge or something" popup. I love Stack Overflow, but the popups are distracting. I have a must-close-popups-OCD disorder, so if I measure performance as the time it takes from clicking my bookmark to being able to use the site, it's been in the 5-digit millisecond range.
2nd data point: The popovers drive me nuts. They feel no different than the admin warnings in Windows, or the "Download our app!" on mobile websites: just clutter getting in the way of what I want. The fact that it's confined a narrow strip at the top makes zero difference.
They're annoying because similar to modal windows, they elicit action (( Welcome Back user! click to reload window->[x])) and it seems they require me to reload my page every time I return due to the use of OpenID (ppl ask why it's cumbersome? here's why... and stackoverflow has the best OpenID implementation I've used)
Personally, I wouldn't mind if it weren't for the fact that popups seem to mess up the browser positioning on url fragment ids. The popups seem to guarantee to pop up over the top line of the fragment that was in the link you've just followed, so you're forced to either close the popup or scroll the web page to read the content that you came to read.
Needless to say, this doesn't enhance the user experience.
I agree, the badge and comment pop-ups are useful, yes, but when I'm not logged in (which seems to be most of the time as Chrome on Linux simply cannot remember me (cookies enabled)) the "hello guest" pop-ups are just unnecessary.
However the "Welcome back [user], click to refresh" is incredibly useful, because of my cookie issue.
Hate to fall into "Me too" category, but you know what happens with these things: some dev somewhere says "well that doesn't happen for me" and nothing gets done about it. Just want to help point out ... YES it is annoying and YES it does happen.
Do all the popups on Stack Overflow factor into the performance measurements? My last three visits I had a "welcome back ... blah blah blah" popup as well as the orange "you've got a badge or something" popup. I love Stack Overflow, but the popups are distracting. I have a must-close-popups-OCD disorder, so if I measure performance as the time it takes from clicking my bookmark to being able to use the site, it's been in the 5-digit millisecond range.