Actually, it's not as bad as the headline implies. Header stays hidden once it disappears, giving you the entire screen to read, but if you scroll up a bit it appears again, so you can use it to navigate. It acts the same as iOS Safari header - once you get used to it, it's really nice.
A completely static site also has this property. When I scroll to the top, I can see the top. When I scroll away from the top, I cannot see the top.
I've just stated a tautology, so I'm missing something.
EDIT I'm seriously wondering whether this whole thing is a joke I'm not getting. Is there a jQuery plug-in that lets me click on text to go to other pages, too?
The easiest way to think of it is a halfway house between fixed and static. You get the benefits of static (maximising vertical screen space) while keeping the benefits of a fixed header (primary navigation always close to hand).
Edit: it's not a joke, it's an established pattern found on both iOS and Android.
Slightly interesting backstory with android: this effect was originally added to the stock browser on android 3.0. I loved how the tiny enhancement gave me more screen real estate, so I decided to build a JS lib to emulate the effect. The pattern didn't make it into the original chrome for Android, but after I mentioned it to Paul Irish he made it happen there too :)
There's no snapback to where you were reading if you double-tap the top. Which sucks and makes for a bad UX if you only need the top bar for a moment (for a share button, for example).
And I'm pretty sure you lost the plot, because this thread is about the header library in the OP, not the browser chrome. Your suggestion to double-tap to the top (with a menu that doesn't follow you) means I lose my place. And so it's not a good suggestion.
Dude. The iPhone was a comparison, not a concrete part of the discussion. Did you, like, read the posts before it in this subthread that are whining about how this thing is useless because you can "just" scroll to the top of the page to see the menu bar on the page? And, now, how tapping to the top isn't a good solution? There are enough upvotes on my posts here that I don't think this is that unclear.
I'm glad I'm not the only one; when I saw the headline I thought "this fix wouldn't be necessary if people just used static pages in the first place."
I've seen headers that stay on-screen while scrolling; even on huge displays they annoy me, so kudos to the author for the effort and putting it out there, but I can't help but feel like he just hit a windmill full tilt.
The point is that you should not have to scroll all the way to the top to see the header. Tools like headroom.js add predictive behavior to your site to improve user experience. I personally really appreciate sites that have it.
