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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

#51

Post by psnehanshu »

Dalewyn wrote: 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 mobile devices the scroll bar is barely visible. So this is a non-issue for mobile.

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

#52

Post by donohoe »

sodapopcan wrote: post #19
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #12

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.

Um, no. Pagination absolutely makes things linkable.

Again, details matter here, but it is easily solvable.

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

#53

Post by sodapopcan »

daptaq wrote: post #27
sodapopcan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not necessarily, if the URL has some absolute position like the ID of the first item instead of the relative number of pages between the newest item and the current page. I believe that Reddit does something like that (of course, only if you sort by new).

It’s situational ya but I was talking more like a product catalogue where items could get shifted around for promotional reasons or whathaveyou.

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

#54

Post by amelius »

Dalewyn wrote: 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…

> Infinite scrolling is universally bad for one, very simple reason: It breaks the scroll bar.

It also breaks the back button, in all implementations I have seen so far.

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

#55

Post by gernb »

I think my only problem with infinite scroll is poor implementations.

If I click a link which takes me a new page and then click back I need the page to go back to the state it was, not jump back to the top. Not sure which sites I've had that issue on recently

I also need it not to crash. I haven't tried it in a while but Patreon used to have the issue that I'd sponsor some content creator and then try to go through their 200 posts. Pateron's infinite scroll is manual with a "load more" button that adds to the page. Let's say each click adds 20 posts. So I'd see 200-181, then plus 20 so 200-161, then plus 20 so 200-141, and say 101 the page would F up. The only thing to do was start over at 200 and click more 6 more times. IIRC it's basically if you expanded a few posts it would F up so starting over from 200 and not expanding posts would get you past the point you made it last time.

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

#56

Post by amelius »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #10
Dalewyn wrote: 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…

> I don’t think we can special-case network streaming here (although it’s not unimportant either).

The relative position inside an infinite stream is always 0, and the height of the scrollbar handle (showing relative size of the viewport relative to the entire document) is also 0.

As the size of a finite-sized document grows, these problems also show.

Problems are: you can't click on the handle since its size is close to 0; you can't click above the the handle to do effectively go one page up, since the handle is at position 0 (or close to it).

Scrollbars are pretty useless for large documents, even more so for infinite streams.

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

#57

Post by xorcist »

Dalewyn wrote: 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 find button.

The item you wanted to search might get unloaded, or not loaded yet, in some bizarre attempt at optimization when the javascript library resposible is an order of magnitude larger than the actual content anyway.

My phone has gigabytes of memory. If you want to present five hundred items in a web shop, just list them and do not bother with any type of pagination, invisible or otherwise.

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

#58

Post by marginalia_nu »

seydor wrote: post #44
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my primary issue with infinite scrolling. However, I wonder if it’s mostly a problem with today’s web browsers. Heck—maybe it’s not even browsers, but websites. I’m pretty sure a website could change the URL as you scroll, so if the page is reloaded (or bookmarked, etc) you’re brought back to where you left off. I usually dislike it when websites mess with URLs, but this seems like an excellent use case!

even if the website did re-start where you left off (difficult), what if you scroll backwards? When you send a link, should it point to the page that you scrolled to, or to the beginning of the list? How many items before/after should load? These arise solely because people chose to reinvent a browser -in-the-browser. With pagination we dont have these issues, the link points to a specific results page, uniquely.

You can still have weird issues with pagination if the data set you're paging through is mutable.

Reddit used to struggle with this back in the day. The way they did pagination was to say "show the next page after id postId=xyz123". Since the algorithm kept re-sorting the posts on the front page, the content moved around quite a lot and you'd see the same things re-appearing on page after page, and sometimes post xyz123 was deleted and then everything broke.

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

#59

Post by sodapopcan »

donohoe wrote: post #52
sodapopcan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Um, no. Pagination absolutely makes things linkable. Again, details matter here, but it is easily solvable.

"Um, yes". As a catalog grows, past items get pushed to later pages making page-linking useless.

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

#60

Post by spookthesunset »

xorcist wrote: post #57
Dalewyn wrote: 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 find button. The item you wanted to search might get unloaded, or not loaded yet, in some bizarre attempt at optimization when the javascript library resposible is an order of magnitude larger than the actual content anyway. My phone has gigabytes of memory. If you want to present five hundred items in a web shop, just list them and do not bother with any type of pagination, invisible or otherwise.

Gigabytes of memory yes but there is load time and render time too. And rendering a 120mb payload of items and their thumbnails before I can even view the top of the page seems… not the best user experience.

I don’t think there is an easy answer here. All options have some trade offs.

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