Interweb Piracy

What are frame bars?

Frame bars are those foreign horizontal top-toolbar stripes superimposed by referring sites (the ones you click out of) onto the site you’re clicking into. The frame bar usage that will come to mind for most of us first is Google Image Search. Websites like Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Digg all have a symbiotic relationship with their users. They provide interesting and engaging ways of organizing and linking to our content online while we spend time creating the content that justifies their existence and fuels their business. Frame bars, in a variety of ways, are throwing this well-balanced symbiotic relationship out of whack.

They plunder web traffic.

There are quite a few articles that have been written recently about how frame bars like the Diggbar allow referring websites to double page hits for themselves by keeping outgoing traffic within their domain. The most significant reason this is a huge no-no (if you aren’t already aware) is that on the Interweb, web traffic equals dollars. If someone spends hours creating quality content for his or her website and wants to sell ads based on page views, he or she is going to be losing money if 50% of those views are lost, credited to a referring site.

For example, my friend Ed Booth is an illustrator who regularly posts comics and animations at his website, offthegridcomic.net. A while back, I got a kick out of an animation he did based on one of my favorite movies, Tommy Boy, and noticed it had been submitted on Digg. If you click the link to the animation from Digg you’ll notice that the url is listed as a Digg url instead of the actual Off the Grid as shown above. Instead of a page view going to Off the Grid, there is strong evidence showing that Digg is keeping that traffic under their domain.

They steal attention.

Web designers put the most important content up top. Branding items and page navigations are nested in prominent places in order to create an ideal user-experience. Often, extra care is made in arranging site elements down to the pixel to neatly display content above the fold, or in the section of your browser window viewable without scrolling. Intrusive frame bars push all of the actual site content down and send the message that referring sites believe that their content is more important than ours.

They pillage the visual appeal of well designed sites.

If I wanted a bunch of horizontal bars cluttering my web browsing experience, I’d grab an old PC, fire up Internet Explorer, and install toolbars for Weather Bug and Norton Antivirus. When I visit a website, I only want to see what the designers and site owners intended. We can get as technical as we want arguing all the SEO & functionality issues, but for me frame bars are just ugly. Paint them with gradients and glossy buttons to your heart’s content. They will still be ugly because no consideration can be made in regards to coordinating with and complementing the sites over which they hover.