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Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

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Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#11
post #2

Infinite scrolling is universally bad for one, very simple reason: It breaks the scroll bar. One of the purposes of a scroll bar is to indicate how long (and/or wide) some piece of content is relative to your window. Another purpose is to indicate your current X/Y position within some piece of content. Both of those purposes are completely broken with the use of infinite scrolling, because the length (and/or width) o…

It also breaks the "virtual scrollbar". if you reload the page you have to start all over

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#14
post #2

Infinite scrolling is universally bad for one, very simple reason: It breaks the scroll bar. One of the purposes of a scroll bar is to indicate how long (and/or wide) some piece of content is relative to your window. Another purpose is to indicate your current X/Y position within some piece of content. Both of those purposes are completely broken with the use of infinite scrolling, because the length (and/or width) o…

That's like claiming every data collection should have a reasonably limited length. Even if that were true, scrollbars in general break when the data gets too large (a pixel of screen movement jumps pages of data) not to mention browser layout performance, memory requirements, etc.

Pagination doesn't work either, because data can shift and you get repeated elements (if the page size is less than the remaining data when moving back to the start) or else truncated pages, or you start on page 10 and move backwards to page -3 before reaching the start. If you jump to a particular element, it requires you to know the absolute offset of all data to calculate page numbers correctly, which when jumping and filtering a large table might be a significant performance cost. Plus it breaks up content - if you're looking at chat history for example, often related messages are broken up into several smaller messages. Having one message on page 10 and the remainder on page 11 would be a terrible experience.

Don't blame this on designers, infinite scroll has been around (apparently?) almost 20 years now. Browsers still don't have an accessible solution despite the ubiquity of this pattern today - browser devs are to blame.

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#15
post #11
post #2

Infinite scrolling is universally bad for one, very simple reason: It breaks the scroll bar. One of the purposes of a scroll bar is to indicate how long (and/or wide) some piece of content is relative to your window. Another purpose is to indicate your current X/Y position within some piece of content. Both of those purposes are completely broken with the use of infinite scrolling, because the length (and/or width) o…

It also breaks the "virtual scrollbar". if you reload the page you have to start all over

This is the killer for me. I’ve gone from loving GitHub to hating it for this one quirk. When you reload the page while viewing a PR, you invariably land at some random spot instead of where you were.

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#17
post #2

Infinite scrolling is universally bad for one, very simple reason: It breaks the scroll bar. One of the purposes of a scroll bar is to indicate how long (and/or wide) some piece of content is relative to your window. Another purpose is to indicate your current X/Y position within some piece of content. Both of those purposes are completely broken with the use of infinite scrolling, because the length (and/or width) o…

On one hand, yes, I agree. On the other hand, it seems to me that this is partly the fault of the scrollbar as an idea. How do you show the current position in a document for which, for one reason or another, you cannot instantly compute the visible height? I still remember an Android PDF viewer which would run through every page of a 2000-page document to get the page dimensions before displaying anything. (From wha…

> How do you show the current position in a document for which, for one reason or another, you cannot instantly compute the visible height?

Perhaps by not "instantly" displaying the document- that is, displaying it before you are able to display its scrollbar.

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#18
post #2

Infinite scrolling is universally bad for one, very simple reason: It breaks the scroll bar. One of the purposes of a scroll bar is to indicate how long (and/or wide) some piece of content is relative to your window. Another purpose is to indicate your current X/Y position within some piece of content. Both of those purposes are completely broken with the use of infinite scrolling, because the length (and/or width) o…

I completely agree with you so I wrote one awhile back that doesn't break the scrollbar and also returns you to where you were on browser back.

It's not perfect but I don't really care to improve it and no one has had any complaints.

Check it out here: https://sayartii.com/search

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#19

Infinite scrolling makes the contents of the page unlinkable, breaks searchability and caching. It always makes the experience worse for unclear benefits. What's the problem it solves? Not resending the header and the footer on changing pages? Really?

Pagination also makes things unlinkable, though. Not that I’m not necessarily defending infinite scrolling, but it’s a tough problem.

Re: Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

#20
The latest ikea redesign is , oh boy how awful. I wonder if they are losing sales already?

There is zero reason for inf. scrolling unless we re talking about addictive substances like fb, tiktok etc. Instead , put plenty of entries in each page (it's 2022, we have good bandwidth, people) and use the tried-and-true, browser-compatible pagination. So that i can send a link to a friend, and i won't need to call her to explain how many times she has to scroll down

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