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Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

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Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#51

Post by dethstar »

davb wrote: post #38

I'm surprised at how many people here seem to like infinite scroll. I personally can't stand it. Imagine having a book where no matter how much you read, it never seems to end. No milestones, no sense of progress. Just page after page after page. It just feels... icky.

To me it really depends on what I'm looking. E.g if I'm looking at clothes online I just really wanna look at everything at bunch click the few I wanna see and be done with it, not having to be clicking and reloading and what not. If I'm looking at something like a blog or news it makes more sense since it helps me realize how old something might be.

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#52

Post by Elepsis »

dj-wonk wrote: post #10

Favor: could someone share an intelligent (or at least in-depth) write-up of the pros/cons of infinite scrolling? Most of what I'm finding on the web is content farmy. Also: at what point is memory usage worth worrying about? Scrolling for pages on end has to be tough on a browser.

Most sites that implement infinite scrolling effectively "unload" content that's far enough off the screen, much like they delay-load content that's below your scroll area. The net memory usage shouldn't be dramatically worse.

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#53

Post by eyesee »

evan_ wrote: post #29
PeterWhittaker wrote: post #11

The permanent menu - with locator options - at the bottom is brilliant.

Unless you scroll a page at a time using Page Down or Space. When I'm at the top of the page, the last visible item is "Live Room". If I page down once, the first visible item becomes "Black Refraction". I never even see that there's an item called "Live Room Out", it's obscured first by the footer and then by the header.

I've wondered if browsers couldn't reduce the paging distance by subtracting the height of header and footer regions on the page (as identified by position: absolute?). Something tells me it would not be so simple.

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#54

Post by ef4 »

usaphp wrote: post #16
lubujackson wrote: post #5

It still jumps around if you hold and drag the scrollbar - always my complaint with these.

I wonder how many people do hold and drag the scrollbar, I am so used to scrolling using a touchpad on Mac and mousewheel on PC, so I never even touch a scrollbar.

You'd be surprised.

I've done many user tests and training sessions only to inwardly wince every time the user painstakingly does that. (And this on their own hardware, with their own mouse they use every day at work.)

After you explain it, they say "wow, that's neat." And then promptly forget it and start dragging the scrollbar again.

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#55

Post by geminitojanus »

Infinite scrolling like this works pretty well if you want to do scrolling for, say, search results.

It's all around horrible for something like Twitter, IMO.

The problem with Twitter is that it's conversational, and it's showing the newest part of the conversation at the top. So instead of having a nice conversation history:

  Hi!
    Hello to you good sir.
      How are you doing today.
        I'm fine.
You get:

  I'm fine.
     How are you today?
       Hello to you good sir.
         Hi!
...and you lose the navigation state, so it's impossible to tell where you were at last on Twitter except by memory.

tl;dr: don't copy Twitter's UI. Please.

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#57

Post by RandallBrown »

lubujackson wrote: post #5

It still jumps around if you hold and drag the scrollbar - always my complaint with these.

I don't know if you ever used the music service Lala back before it got bought by Apple and shut down, but they had a really nice infinite scroll implementation.

When viewing your music library, the scroll bar grabber would be the correct size for how many items were in your library so grabbing it and scrolling would work right. It didn't load all X number of items you had at a time though either.

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#58

Post by evan_ »

eyesee wrote: post #53
evan_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you scroll a page at a time using Page Down or Space. When I'm at the top of the page, the last visible item is "Live Room". If I page down once, the first visible item becomes "Black Refraction". I never even see that there's an item called "Live Room Out", it's obscured first by the footer and then by the header.

I've wondered if browsers couldn't reduce the paging distance by subtracting the height of header and footer regions on the page (as identified by position: absolute?). Something tells me it would not be so simple.

it should be possible for the page to fix, I think, by listening for a pagedown or spacebar press and changing the scroll position based on the height of the viewport minus the height of the stuff that obscures the viewport.

I think it would be really difficult for the browser to come up with a solution that would work anywhere.

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#59

Post by jakub_g »

I would feel kind of okay with infinite scroll if it wasn't creating memory problems. Especially on image-heavy (tumblr) / DOM-heavy (facebook) pages. If I browsed the web in 90s mode (one window, one page opened) that would maybe work, but when I have dozens of tabs opened, youtube playing in background and I start browsing an endless memory-hungry page, my laptop (3 GB RAM) starts dying.

Another issue is the one mentioned in the other subthread here, often when you accidentally click some link on the page, you can't go back, it'll start loading everything from scratch. Happens to me e.g. on facebook on IE Mobile (apparently they don't use pushState). This effectively means I have to open links in a new tab.

Re: Google’s suggestion for a better infinite scroll?

#60

Post by jfoster »

garethadams wrote: post #45
jfoster wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Facebook there is a footer, and seemingly no way to get to it unless you find a short enough page or manage to get to it faster than the infinite scroll can load.

All of the links in the footer are also at the bottom of the right-hand main column

Thank you for pointing that out. I think that area might have been a blind-spot for me. (immediately below the ads)
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