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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?

#71
post #16

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.

Dragging with the scrollbar is far more accurate if you know where on the page you're headed (of course an impossibility with infinite scrolling).

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

#73
post #47
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.

Sure but a progress bar or "page" counter at the top would alleviate that somewhat.

... isn't that part of what a scrollbar is for?

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

#74
post #69
post #59

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 me…

I've thought about this before - where you have a 2D array of images with infinite scroll in all directions. You need to track the scroll position, and kill the elements that are scrolling away as you create the new elements in the direction you are scrolling - with the entire purpose of creating enough cached images so that it is seamless to the user. The problem is that the scroll position changes back when you kil…

You could solve a lot of problems with position: absolute and javascript, which you assume is on.

A bigger problem is that mobile safari doesn't let you execute js during scroll. One way around that is by hsing iScroll which fakes scrolling using CSS.

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

#75
post #59

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 me…

I also wonder about "memory problems", but of the soft kind. I like to consuming "pages" of content at a time, spread between many tabs. Usually I read to the bottom of a "page", and then switch tabs. When I come back to that tab, I'm ready to go to the next page.

But with infinite scrolling, I feel like I'd be re-reading content to find my exact spot I left off..

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

#78
post #59

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 me…

When you're loading more elements at the bottom - drop the equivalent count of elements from the top of the list. Problem solved.

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

#79
post #64
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's Wave used (and reused) a fixed number of DOM elements that were filled by fly-weights containing the data to be shown on that page. While the scroll bar showed the appropriate position in the thread, there was a limited amount of data for the items above and below the visible set, and an even more limited number of DOM elements that could be filled with data.

That's interesting. So whenever I scrolled a lot down, and wanted to scroll to the beginning, the related data was re-fetched? Or it was stored in the data model, but just not displayed in the DOM?

Stored in the data model; the memory issue is a rendering one (not a hard drive capacity one)

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

#80
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.

This reminds me of Gabriel García Marquez's novel _The Autumn of the Patriarch_, which has no paragraphs and infinitely long sentences.
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