Go to Inspect element and do control + F to search for the string.
This still wont solve for lazy loading data on scroll, which is actually how its supposed to be done, to reduce load time, and dom draw together.
Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#22Other problems: - Scroll, scroll, scroll, and then click a link. Now click back. You have lost your place. - How can anyone link to a section far down? - Impossible to read or use anything in the footer. I suppose if you install infinite scrolling, you remove the footer. But I have heard a story where they forgot.
Twitter seems to have the back thing down somehow. I don't know how it works (my best guess is making a and only loading a few tweets around the scroll position and making that work with bfcache) but so it is apparently possible to make that work fine.
Linking to things in the middle of a page was solved in the 90s with the hash part of the URL. Aside from legal terms or privacy policies, I haven't yet seen a site with excessively tall pages that don't have some mechanism (hash part or direct linking an entry) of linking to in-the-middle content.
Most sites with infinite scroll don't have a footer, though I have seen a few. Inspect element works well enough there imo, if you're tech savvy of course.
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#23Other problems: - Scroll, scroll, scroll, and then click a link. Now click back. You have lost your place. - How can anyone link to a section far down? - Impossible to read or use anything in the footer. I suppose if you install infinite scrolling, you remove the footer. But I have heard a story where they forgot.
First two are somewhat easily solve-able, yet it involves JavaScript.
Sadly, most devs know how to implement an infinite scroll, but lack the skill to implement it properly.
Footer — there should be none on an infinitely-scrolled page, but that depends on the layout.
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#24I see lots of replies suggesting scrolling for a long time and then using CTRL+F. However, this won't work if the page is using virtualised scrolling (common with React et al. SPA for performance reasons, to avoid huge DOM trees as the page expands). The majority of content that is outside of the visible window will simply be unmounted from the DOM. I'm not sure what the best-practice for a webapp designer is here? P…
Google Docs implements custom search. Unless web frameworks start to expose some basic controls to the user, like pre-walled-garden Operating Systems, that's what we have to wait for
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#25This is a real interesting rant. I've definitely had this problem and wondered about the benefits of infinite scroll at those times. Also bad UX design.
I can't offer anything besides the fact that I love my mouse which has this free roll toggle button. When I press that I can roll the wheel really fast and long without anything slowing it down.
But it's sad that certain websites force users to such measures.
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#26For reddit specifically, the answer seems to be to use "old.reddit.com" instead of "www.reddit.com".
The is no general solution. Infinite scroll style web apps are implementing their own content view, in essence a web browser inside a web browser. It will never behave as users expect.
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#271. Click somewhere on the page so the scrolling works 2. Hold down Ctrl + End until a desired amount of pages loads 3. Ctrl + F to find $string
That's what I used to do but sites like Twitter unload content to not make your browser tab super slow (which is a good thing in general), which breaks ctrl+f.
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#28I see lots of replies suggesting scrolling for a long time and then using CTRL+F. However, this won't work if the page is using virtualised scrolling (common with React et al. SPA for performance reasons, to avoid huge DOM trees as the page expands). The majority of content that is outside of the visible window will simply be unmounted from the DOM. I'm not sure what the best-practice for a webapp designer is here? P…
that's what discourse does. it's frustrating because it's significantly slower than the built-in browser search, probably in part due to excessive network accesses, but also probably due to poor caching and inefficient implementation.
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#29For reddit specifically, the answer seems to be to use "old.reddit.com" instead of "www.reddit.com". The is no general solution. Infinite scroll style web apps are implementing their own content view, in essence a web browser inside a web browser. It will never behave as users expect.
This is a good answer that works in reddit, but if you change the user agent, it will work in almost any website with support for ie.
IE6 User Agent:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/
This can be done with Selenium too.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29916054/change-user-age...
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#30I see lots of replies suggesting scrolling for a long time and then using CTRL+F. However, this won't work if the page is using virtualised scrolling (common with React et al. SPA for performance reasons, to avoid huge DOM trees as the page expands). The majority of content that is outside of the visible window will simply be unmounted from the DOM. I'm not sure what the best-practice for a webapp designer is here? P…
That's a horrible UX.
A better practice would be to avoid infinite scroll and better yet to think carefully before using a full-blown SPA for a standard UI. If it's a web page as opposed to a web app, there are certain UX features that every browser supports out of the box and many, many users with keyboards will expect.