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I like pagination because it provides stop points to the time sink. Infinite scrolling works too well for sucking people's attention indefinitely.
The reason you don't like infinite scroll is the exact reason website owners love it.
From a technical perspective, in many cases getting the total count required for formal pagination is actually extremely tricky. Even in postgres, the count operation on an indexed table is extremely slow. In cases where the query is doing something more complicated than hitting an RDBMS, getting the total count could be substantially more complicated. Also, I hate pagination in almost every case.
Pagination doesn’t require a total page count to still be useful. You might remember Google’s UI in its first 10 years or so, which had pagination but not a total page count (if the number of pages exceeded 10 or so). You can use a ellipsis or a word like “many” and people will easily understand.
Example on first try: https://www.google.com/search?q=foobarfrak navigate to the last result. And you get a really misleading "No results containing all your search terms were found." page...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason you don't like infinite scroll is the exact reason website owners love it.
We should change their incentives. Would also help if website owners started considering the well being if others.
How? Stop using sites with infinite scrolling seems the only viable option.
Infinite scroll is frustrating on higher latency connections, which I have all the time being here in Australia. Particularly when you want to skip towards the end of the list. YouTube has recently changed all their playlists etc to infinite scroll and it takes FOREVER to scroll 5 pages down to get to the bottom of the list. And they don't have a UI to reverse the list order or jump ahead. They did recently add a lis…
But why would you ever want to do that? The system already picks the best videos for you to watch, so you wouldn't even have to scroll.
Infinite scroll is frustrating on higher latency connections, which I have all the time being here in Australia. Particularly when you want to skip towards the end of the list. YouTube has recently changed all their playlists etc to infinite scroll and it takes FOREVER to scroll 5 pages down to get to the bottom of the list. And they don't have a UI to reverse the list order or jump ahead. They did recently add a lis…
I should add that I've always suspected a lot of developers don't test their apps with latency in mind, so they make silly decisions like serial requests, etc. They never see how awful the experience is for someone not living next door to their data centre.
For search results (eg: Amazon) I can refine with filters and sort the results, but I can see why some people might prefer pagination here to feel more in control.
Since Google introduced infinite scrolling on mobile, I've switched to Bing (which still has pagination), and I have to say... I do not miss Google Search at all!
I agree entirely with the points made in the article and add one further issue: if you end up navigating away from a feed for any reason, and use the back button to return to where you were, you often lose the place in the feed. It wastes time, can cause janky loading, and is all round just really poor UX.
But then websites started breaking middle-click for no fucking reason.