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Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?

#71

Post by strangattractor »

Rendering with JS causes many difficulties. It often simply makes the content less useful - how do we index such a page for efficient discovery (search) for example. Running JS locally to render pages is problematic and often does not work.

I cannot tell you how many times I have gone to commerce sites that use infinite scroll - scroll down - click on and look at a product - back button to listing page returns to top of scrolling page making me scroll down again. What a waste of time.

Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?

#72

Post by Kaze404 »

Fnoord wrote: post #61
mschuetz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps intercepting Ctrl+F Please don't ever do that. I know one site that does this and I hate it.

Discourse [1], popular forum software, does this as well. [1] https://www.discourse.org/

This is infuriating. Every time I CTRL+F on Discourse I get upset.

Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?

#74

Post by blacksmith_tb »

sobellian wrote: post #48
cronin101 wrote: post #19

I 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…

GitHub does this in workflow logs and it makes it impossible to copy/paste logs greater than the number of lines in your view. Then you download the raw logs and every line has a timestamp so you need to write a shell command just to parse out the actual text you wanted to copy.

They also bind to the "/" to focus on their searchbox, which breaks the native behavior in FF (which would be a single-keystroke for Find in Page, at least meta-f still works). Google likes to do this too, e.g. Google Tag Manager.

Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?

#75

Post by ultrarunner »

mschuetz wrote: post #44
cronin101 wrote: post #19

I 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…

> Perhaps intercepting Ctrl+F Please don't ever do that. I know one site that does this and I hate it.

Google Docs does this, e.g. in a spreadsheet. I think it's reasonable in that context.

For what it's worth, if you really need to search e.g. "View" to figure out where the View menu is, the OS-native menu option still works.

Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?

#76

Post by robbrown451 »

You can paste something like this into your javascript console:

setInterval(function() { window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight); }, 2000);

That will scroll continuously, so you can let it run for a while and then do ctrl-F. It might take a while but you can do something else. I've used it successfully many times (usually when I wanted to scrape the DOM for some reason or another, rather than just do a search).

Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?

#77

Post by huebomont »

cronin101 wrote: post #19

I 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…

The solution is to stop re-writing basic browser functions. Just let me scroll.

Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?

#78

Post by malux85 »

blablabla123 wrote: post #68
dangerface wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure what the best-practice for a webapp designer is here? Perhaps intercepting Ctrl+F Oh god no, the solution is simple stop reimplementing the browser in the browser.

The result can give a much better UX if done properly. (If done poorly it's just frustrating of course...) Just think of SPAs vs normal backend templated apps. The SPA can be much faster with poor network connection or when the data needed is large but unpredictable. Then the SPA can really shine, if routing is (re-)implemented well enough.

What about MX (machine experience)?

Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?

#80

Post by sfoley »

robbrown451 wrote: post #76

You can paste something like this into your javascript console: setInterval(function() { window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight); }, 2000); That will scroll continuously, so you can let it run for a while and then do ctrl-F. It might take a while but you can do something else. I've used it successfully many times (usually when I wanted to scrape the DOM for some reason or another, rather than just do a search)…

I've tried this twice in the last year or so: once on twitter and once on dropbox. Neither time did it work. It _seemed_ that ctrl+f would not find anything that was not visible +/- a screen height or two. I couldn't tell if it was a shortcoming of Firefox (unlikely IMO) or both sites tried to be clever about dynamically unloading content when it was outside the view window (more likely).
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