The most annoying thing about web pages is...

Patience link hopper.

I almost believe it's intentional. Drive up ad click revenues.

I think auto-playing videos on news sites is my second peeve. There is nothing worse than visiting a page and before you have time to react, some loud ass local news jingle starts blasting through your speakers. Any kind of auto-playing audio is extremely bad web etiquette. I thought most web designers had learned that by the year 2000 but obviously not...

Some browsers can be configured to only load plugins on demand.

Given that are umty-eleben ways (i.e. languages/tech ctacks) to build web sites, no standards have yet to be agreed upon (nor proposed) since every tech stack thinks THEY have the answer.
 
Unlike the DAW world, eh?
 
Just export/import a .wav, .omf, .mp3, .dot.dot.dot sumpin
 
Just make sure it's the right bit and sample rate else your friends DAW will puke.

craigb
HTML Producer X5a?

with skylight.

I agree it's super annoying.
 

sharke
 
You'd think web designers would have fixed this issue by now. Or is it impossible? I can't see why the browser couldn't work out the size of all page elements first and create placeholder boxes which would retain their size as each element was loaded. Would this be possible somehow?

It's not impossible but probably not worth sinking the time to fix it for every browser flavor and variation. 
 
In theory - it is supposed to work exactly as you describe the stylesheet or inline style rules would dictate the page layout. In practice things like not specifying image dimensions or injecting content with javascript will trigger a repaint when the image is downloaded and the dimensions are calculated.
 
We use both PageSpeed and YSlow to measure and tinker with page render times on our sites. Google has an entire page dedicated to reflow: https://developers.google.com/speed/articles/reflow
 
Responsive and "mobile" sites can make it even trickier. The user flips their phone and it triggers a repaint.

This is one of the many reasons I'm trying to keep things as simple as possible with my site design. The less scripts and doodads the less this type of stuff happens and since it annoys me to no end it would be kind of hypocritical of me to make my own visitors endure it.
 
That said... I'm surprised you guys aren't using NoScript. It stops pretty much all that crap and just loads the fundamentals. You'd think that would screw up the sites beyond use but 95% of the time, if you are just reading something, it's totally fine and if something does screwup you can usually just add the main domain and maybe one or two others (in the case of streaming audio/video) and you have all the content without all the extra annoying crap.
 
Between NoScript and ABP (and making sure they're set up correctly) I haven't seen an ad in YEARS except on the very rare occasions when those addons didn't load properly. Somehow they even manage to get rid of those preroll ads on youtube and news sites. I went to visit my mom a while back and was using her laptop while I was there and it was screwed the hell up. I wanted to do clean wipe on it but didn't have time. There were so many godamned popups and sidebars and banners and autoplay crap on all my usual site it was horrible (and SLOOOOOW as hell). I reinstalled Firefox (which had become completely corrupted somehow), put the add ons on and it was pretty much just like working on my laptop at home.
 
The only real pain in the ass with those programs is trying to figure out which scripts need to be allowed to make certain elements work. Some sites will have a dozen or more extra sites listed all trying to load extra crap so figuring out where a video is hosted or what is needed to fill out forms can be a bit confusing but I've gotten familiar with the more common site names that can be trusted and what the garbage sites feeding ads and spying are. Simple google searches reveal who's who.
 
I personally think it's worth the trade off to get the extra load speed, security and not having to look at all that garrish nonsense assaulting my eyeballs. Autoplay ads also scare the piss out of me too when I'm not expecting them. lol
 
On a side note, sharke... when you get a minute I could use your input on some stuff in this thread...
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Focusrite-VRM-Box-Users-How-are-you-guys-setting-up-the-VRM-with-Sonar-m3089016.aspx
 
Finally gots me a VRM Box. Woo hoo!
 
Cheers.

sharke
 
Many hair-tearing experiences using my iPhone for example. 

Hahaha problem solved! Get a Nexus phone 
 

Beepster
The only real pain in the ass with those programs is trying to figure out which scripts need to be allowed to make certain elements work. Some sites will have a dozen or more extra sites listed all trying to load extra crap so figuring out where a video is hosted or what is needed to fill out forms can be a bit confusing but I've gotten familiar with the more common site names that can be trusted and what the garbage sites feeding ads and spying are. Simple google searches reveal who's who.

 
Most of those tools support wildcards, you can wildcard popular cdn's like 'ajax.googleapis.com/*' or 'maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/*' and 'ajax.microsoft.com/*'. Lots and lots of websites just use the popular cdn's for things like jquery, angular or bootstrap.