As always it's never that simple. Infinite scroll is great for browsing images. That's whats it's always been good for.
Except it's not. Those image loads start to bring a heavy memory hit. It especially stinks on mobile browsers.
Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
31–40 of 87 posts
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#32Without going point by points to counter every reason I would like to say I absolutely love continuous scrolling when I am shopping or looking at items on a retailers website.
>Users will lose the page length orientation - the browser scrollbar become useless.
This is entirely untrue I can still use my scrollbar to get back to the top of the page again, it can also be used to easily skim the results that were displayed.
For most retail shopping I actually would rather have this than pagination especially if I am lazily browsing on my ipad, no reason to change hand positions.
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#33As an alternative, I'm going to start using something like http://emberjs.com/list-view/ (warning: not mobile optimized) It solves 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 10, and could reasonably be implemented with bookmarking to fix 6 and 9. SEO is still an issue, but really, when is it not?
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#34Number 7 is exacty what you want: http://www.nirandfar.com/2012/08/the-webs-slot-machine.html
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#35Without going point by points to counter every reason I would like to say I absolutely love continuous scrolling when I am shopping or looking at items on a retailers website. >Users will lose the page length orientation - the browser scrollbar become useless. This is entirely untrue I can still use my scrollbar to get back to the top of the page again, it can also be used to easily skim the results that were display…
I really don't like continuous scrolling for retail shopping. its easier to remember what page something was on than a relative position. I don't mind it for pointless content consumption like Reddit and Facebook, because I rarely ever want to go back to something on those platforms.
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#36Infinite scroll can be implemented well, but more often than not it's implementation is just terrible. Take Soundcloud for example. I love their service, their UI is generally pretty good, their site is usually fast, and in most cases, their product is a pleasure to use. But their implementation of infinite scroll is terrible. I'm not sure what it is, I haven't troubleshooted it too much but when you scroll a playlist with a lot of songs, every so often, the pages repeat themselves. And sometimes when you scroll down below a certain point it will just restart at page one.
So if I open a playlist with ~400 songs and I want to reach the bottom, there is no way for me to do it but to just scroll really fast and wait for each page to load. Okay, fine. But when I do this, usually about ~30% of the time it will start repeating pages or it will just start feeding the playlist from the first song again. In this case, I think infinite scroll does ruins the experience. If anyone out there from Soundcloud is listening, please consider implementing pagination.
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#37Infinite scrolling also consumes a lot of memory since resources like images pile-up endlessly. Compare that to a page-number navigation scheme where only the displayed resources on a given page are loaded. Not everyone has a fast computer (or tablet).
I hate flickr's infinite scrolling because of this. It's impossible for me to browse more than a few pages worth of images on flickr.
And of course flickr doesn't have any good tools for fine-tuning search results, so infinite scrolling is the only way to try and find what you want.
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#38Here's how linkedin does pagination https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BkKYEmkCAAA3x8u.png:large I think an infinite scroll would be better...
I think infinite scrolling would be much worse in that case.
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#39All these problems are solvable. I co-founded Discourse ( http://discourse.org ) which uses infinite scrolling heavily. Discourse is also 100% open source so you can see how we did it. My responses below: > Users will lose the page length orientation - the browser scrollbar become useless. We have a fixed "x/y" posts widget at the bottom with a progress bar. > There’s no ability to jump to the end of the list. The af…
So you're essentially rebuilding a browser inside of a browser?
Re: Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
#40All these problems are solvable. I co-founded Discourse ( http://discourse.org ) which uses infinite scrolling heavily. Discourse is also 100% open source so you can see how we did it. My responses below: > Users will lose the page length orientation - the browser scrollbar become useless. We have a fixed "x/y" posts widget at the bottom with a progress bar. > There’s no ability to jump to the end of the list. The af…
Very well done. This is essentially the response I would have given in the abstract, but I appreciate that you actually have a presentable implementation.