It’s very tricky to make it convenient for most, without losing accessibility for some. Preferences and device capabilities vary by a whole lot, and unless you’re going to do the work to detect or ask people, and then support multiple mechanisms, you are probably best off being as close to minimal and standard as possible.
My primary mechanism for reading branching sites/articles (those with multiple topics I want to follow) is to open a lot of tabs, then work forward through them, opening more in the process. Hover is convenient to give me a quick idea of whether it’s worth opening a tab, but it’s really inconvenient if it stays too long or slows me down when I already know I want the tab.
LW goes a bit too far toward this, for me. It’s fine on desktop, where I have lots of screen real-estate and the mouse click/focus works to dismiss the popups/hovers pretty well. It kind of annoys me when middle-click or control-click don’t work to bring up a new tab (for shortforms or some comment-notice links), but that’s tolerable. On Chrome on iOS, at least, it’s _very_ annoying. in order to long-press to get the “open in new tab” option, it brings up a window that obscures a lot of other items, and there’s no obvious way on the small screen to dismiss the “hover” without changing the underlying view in some way.
It’s very tricky to make it convenient for most, without losing accessibility for some. Preferences and device capabilities vary by a whole lot, and unless you’re going to do the work to detect or ask people, and then support multiple mechanisms, you are probably best off being as close to minimal and standard as possible.
My primary mechanism for reading branching sites/articles (those with multiple topics I want to follow) is to open a lot of tabs, then work forward through them, opening more in the process. Hover is convenient to give me a quick idea of whether it’s worth opening a tab, but it’s really inconvenient if it stays too long or slows me down when I already know I want the tab.
LW goes a bit too far toward this, for me. It’s fine on desktop, where I have lots of screen real-estate and the mouse click/focus works to dismiss the popups/hovers pretty well. It kind of annoys me when middle-click or control-click don’t work to bring up a new tab (for shortforms or some comment-notice links), but that’s tolerable. On Chrome on iOS, at least, it’s _very_ annoying. in order to long-press to get the “open in new tab” option, it brings up a window that obscures a lot of other items, and there’s no obvious way on the small screen to dismiss the “hover” without changing the underlying view in some way.