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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

#91

Post by _cd »

spookthesunset wrote: post #60
xorcist wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Typically when I serialize data for #index endpoints I return much slimmer payloads than I do in #show endpoints. I recognize that 120mb was an extreme, but you should be able to serialize lists of 500+ items into well under 1mb, with enough data to render your list view thumbnails/links.

I always thought the infinite scroll pattern was designed for analytics purposes. So that you can track user engagement. Not because technology constraints necessitated it or that it was a good user experience.

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

#92

Post by shadowgovt »

spookthesunset wrote: post #60
xorcist wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sooner or later you have to unload content or the browser crashes. There's an upper limit to how many DOM elements browsers can handle, even with modern optimizations.

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

#97

Post by paulryanrogers »

amelius wrote: post #56
mananaysiempre wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clos…

I recall desktop UIs solving this by having a minimum scroll button size. Then just aligning the bar to the full height of the doc, at least where the data size was known. And when first loaded the bar would sometimes shift as it loaded, albeit without having to scroll to force further loading.

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

#98

Post by criley2 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #43
criley2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, none of my mobile browsers even have a scroll bar.

An autohiding scroll bar is still a scroll bar.

I legitimately cannot get Chrome for Android to show a scroll bar under any circumstance. Android 13 / pixel 6 pro / Chrome, there is simply no scroll bar on any page no matter what.

EDIT: Ah! I see it! I have a curved screen and the 1 px thin "bar" is only on the curved edge of the screen which catches the light and isn't visible. Fair enough.

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

#99

Post by Wowfunhappy »

criley2 wrote: post #98
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An autohiding scroll bar is still a scroll bar.

I legitimately cannot get Chrome for Android to show a scroll bar under any circumstance. Android 13 / pixel 6 pro / Chrome, there is simply no scroll bar on any page no matter what. EDIT: Ah! I see it! I have a curved screen and the 1 px thin "bar" is only on the curved edge of the screen which catches the light and isn't visible. Fair enough.

Wow! Okay, well that's dumb, never mind then!

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

#100

Post by djcannabiz »

spookthesunset wrote: post #70
psnehanshu wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don’t even think you can grab the scroll bar and move around on iOS… though I kinda remember you being able to way back in the day…

you definitely can, try long pressing on it
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