Block jquery.nicescroll.js to make sites responsive

Internet

Have you ever visited a website, attempted to scroll, and…
    …it feels really…
        …jerky and…
            …slow?

Check out the Ring of Saturn website to see what I mean. I don’t mean to pick on them specifically, it’s just a useful demonstration.

I looked at the page source, and found this ironically-named Nicescroll jQuery package which they’d imported. The official site showcases a newer version which is smoother than the above site, but is so floaty and imprecise it could make you feel seasick. The JS Fiddle is equally poor, with a visible delay between when you scroll and when the page responds.

If you use uBlock Origin or a similar plugin, you can banish it by adding the following to your blocklist:

*/jquery.nicescroll.js

Anti-patterns like this aren’t new. Certain web developers have been duplicating browser functionality in JavaScript for years, at huge cost to accessibility and page load times. It’s equal parts hilarious and tragic, like the kid who bounced a basketball into my face and bent my glasses last week. Only at least the kid didn’t try to sell the result as a vision improvement!

If this were a @ShitUserStory:

As a: website visitor
I want to: have native scrolling replaced with a JS library
So that: I can s-s-s-scroll worse.

Author bio and support

Me!

Ruben Schade is a technical writer and infrastructure architect in Sydney, Australia who refers to himself in the third person. Hi!

The site is powered by Hugo, FreeBSD, and OpenZFS on OrionVM, everyone’s favourite bespoke cloud infrastructure provider.

If you found this post helpful or entertaining, you can shout me a coffee or send a comment. Thanks ☺️.