Can any UX people illuminate the modern popularity of these things? I find them very distracting, and typically unusable. When I'm scrolling down the page, the function I'm performing is consumption of content. With a sidebar there begging me to click away (or worse, display ads and social media junk), it considerably reduces my desire to perform this function. It just reminds me of the Java applets in 1996 for sidebar buttons.
not so sure about the "Finally" claim. been using <a href="https://github.com/terkel/jquery-floating-widget" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/terkel/jquery-floating-widget</a> for a while, it also has the ability to stop floating when past a certain container's bottom edge. it's also much lighter weight.<p>demo: <a href="http://terkel.jp/demo/jquery-floating-widget-plugin.html" rel="nofollow">http://terkel.jp/demo/jquery-floating-widget-plugin.html</a>
I thought binding to window.scroll was considered bad practice without something like this <a href="http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-throttle-debounce-plugin/" rel="nofollow">http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-throttle-debounce-plugin...</a>
UserAgent sniffing and Graceful Degradation do not mesh.<p>This sniffing in particular will fail for Opera 6-8, therefore excluding perfectly capable browsers by a very shallow criterion.<p>The sniff serves no purpose, and is furthermore based upon a thoroughly disproved anti-pattern.
That page feels extremely sluggish when scrolling... I don't think I'm ever going to use this. And yes I'm using a browser with hardware acceleration intentionally disabled to simulate slower computers.