Not to mention one misclick that brings you to a different page will instantly make you lose all scrolling "progress", on some fast-paced websites without a chance to find the original position again.
You can still implement this by updating the URL dynamically as you pass the (invisible) page delimiter. I’ve seen infinite scrolling news sites implement this.
Yup. And you can implement something that loads all the content up until that point when the user presses F5 in the middle of the page. And you can implement smooth scrolling that takes into account your sticky header. And you can make your pagination based on the ID of the last seen page item instead of based on count.
The question is, is this the best use of your time? Are you willing to invest more time in it when you give it to the user? Because the user will do something you haven't thought of, they will break it, and you will need to fix it.
You can, but that means if a user scrolls through a page and decides to share it by copying the URL they'll get a link to the page they've just scrolled in to rather than the one they've just read which is very likely to be wrong. It's something that makes me much less likely to share links.
Even in some case scrolling back to the top makes you lose the progress. And that happens automatically when you do a Ctr-F and start typing, the matching of the first character you type will likely be at the top of the page.
Even worse is how infinite scrolling breaks Ctrl-F searching. Most websites no longer render the offscreen content to improve performance, so the content you scrolled past (and the content you haven't gotten to yet) is no longer there for searching.
That's probably just a poor implementation on those websites. I thought the ability to search across larger content using Ctrl-F is one of the major advantages of infinite scrolling over traditional pagination.
> Most websites no longer render the offscreen content to improve performance
Which may now be obsolete. Over the last year firefox has implemented some amazing flexbox layout computation improvements that make appending to a flexbox with many elements (>5k) stay fast. It only re-computes the changed ones.
Of course you need to do some profiling to check that you don't accidentally deviate from the happy path by introducing changes that touch all elements.
To be fair, this only happens due to programming bugs on the website. You can easily store the scroll position in the HTML5 pushstate API. The big websites like Twitter and Facebook get this right.
Famously, imgur gets it wrong. After 10 images you can click "load more images" to see the rest of the album, but when you return to the album you have to click it again.
I just tried Twitter on my iPhone and it fails as described if I manually put in a new URL and then go back from there. Google gets it wrong in their search results. When it’s that common to have this bug I’d say it’s fair to just consider it to be part of the technique.
Facebook does not get this right. I end up in a random place with content I haven’t seen is the back button all the time. It’s one of the things I hate most about the UI.
I agree with most points but not with the bookmarking. Bookmarking paginated content is rarely useful, unless the content rarely changes.
The thing that irritates me a lot with infinite scrolling is that it ruins history. If the content somehow botches open in new tab then this basically constrains the user to only ever see one piece of detail before getting crazy.
that is mostly a complaint against poorly implemented infinite scrolling. there’s no reason why it would have the break urls, indexing, or the back button.
There's a lot of reasons why it would break all of those things. Hacking it so that the URL & history is rewritten when content is loaded is significant extra work.
I have no idea what you mean by indexing, given the word index doesn't feature in the article. You also ignore the problems of making the scrollbar useless & the footer unreachable. I don't see any fix for those issues at all.
The way we did it for a product search type website was to show a regular page first, with a "show more" button. After clicking that button, it would auto load the next page(s) on scroll. If all you wanted was the footer, you wouldn't ever experience the auto load.
By index they’re referring to SEO because google indexes pages. Scroll bar is useless? Add a tap to load more button, give the user control of when content loads and now the can scroll comfortably. Need a footer? You can have a sticky one.
I’d add: if you do pagination, do large pages instead of a huge number of small pages. It’s easy to scroll quickly through a fixed size page, it’s a pain in the ass to have to click through pages.
More small pages means more opportunities to show ads. And in the case of search, a larger portion of the first page can be given to sponsored results. :-(
Somehow the web has evolved to a place where the poles of infinite scroll and excessively short pages are two of the great annoyances.
Highly biased opinions... What about articles where access to all parts is needed, like scientific articles, manuals, reports, etc? And for the general public too, at least part of readers are able to concentrate on reading much longer than thru a couple of paragraphs.
Using links or buttons would suck for a lot of use cases. Imagine what it would work like on your phone if you couldn't scroll through Twitter, but had to touch buttons.
Funny that you use Twitter as an example because infinity scrolling on
Twitter is the reason the side is so unusable. Whenever you click an
image/link or try to zoom in/out, you take the risk to lose your current
scroll position.
i bet it would be theoretically feasible to take each individual page of a book and perform some chemical process on them such that you join the bottom of a given page with the top of the next one on chemical level, in which case, a book certainly can be a single page. really, all books are just a single conceptual page split at given boundaries to give the impression of structure.
no, I didn't say that you can turn a book into a single page exactly. I said that you can bind the pages of a book together in such a way that it would be one long, continuous page. rather, i said that conceptually, a book can be a single page, and beyond that I also went on to clarify that a book is nothing more than a single page split at arbitrary locations to give the impression of structure.
if there were a single piece of paper long enough to hold the entirety of a book, and it were written out on that page, would that make it any less of a book? it may not be one in the sense that it is no longer bound together, but at the same time, in the former example the pages were bound together by some chemical process into one monolithic page; the only thing missing is a cover to hold it together, though I have seen college textbooks come as just loose leaf paper that one has to bind themselves but that's still a "book" prior to binding.
also: what if a story or some such were to be written on a scroll? just because it doesn't fit the precise literal definition of what a book is, doesn't mean it doesn't contain the same semiotic substance as "book" and as such doesn't mean that it automatically isn't one. but maybe im just being pedantic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Counter examples can be found all over the internet (e.g. many gnu manuals have the option to show all information in a single HTML page, quite a few Gutenberg books are in a single HTML file).
(I'm wondering if you think the objection is to scrolling, it's not, there is a difference between a long page with scroll bars that give an indication on how far you are on the page, and infinite scrolling where the page gets longer each time you read the end of the page)
One of the websites where one can find this annnoying "infinite scroll" is YouTube channels.
I wrote a quick and dirty script to address this annoyance.
It can be used to output a table of all the video urls and video titles for any YouTube channel.
"yy032" and "yy025" are some utilities I wrote to decode html and transform urls to HTTP for HTTP/1.1 pipelining, respectively.1 Instead of using yy025 and openssl, one could alternatively make a separate TCP connection for each HTTP request, e.g., using something like curl. Personally, I prefer not to make lots of connections when retrieving mutiple pages from the same domain.
Here is a hypothetical example of how to use the script, "1.sh", to make a table of all the video urls and video titles in a channel.
It's terrible for image galleries too, as the images stay in RAM and the memory usage can quickly become insane. Animated GIF galleries are especially bad for this.
Depends on implementation, you could remove the images from DOM when the user has scrolled passed them, and many libraries for inifinite scroll do exactly that.
I mean an image gallery of thumbnails, that lead to the real image. Like you search for a wallpaper with key words and then scroll to infinity and open the interesting ones in a new tab.
Twitter is horrible - scroll down a few pages, click something interesting, hit back, and you’ve lost position, and have to reload and rescroll through everything again. Even worse because some clicks will open a modal that you can close and save position, but other clicks will reload the page.
It s horrible. I constantly lose posts because of zooming in, open in new tabs, misclick etc. And its made even worse by the fact that the whole feed will change if i hit reload
That's just as heinous as those news sites which load the next article when you scroll to the bottom of the current article. It appears to sometimes be part of the article you're reading and then your on another page trying to figure out what the hell happened. I really don't know how these so-called designers get paid to confuse their readers and customers.
Related bonus: On many sites, if you try to print the article you've just read to the bottom, you can't print that article, you can only print the next article, and even scrolling back to the top won't fix it.
oh my god yes! I've ran into this same problem and thought i was going crazy. cant remember if i was printing or just saving the articles to somewhere, but i kept getting a completely unrelated article.
how does someone mess up their website that badly? i dont even know how something like that is possible
To me infinite scroll or not is more about what kind of content is it, statistics like generated clicks and of course UX, than the questions what's more difficult to implement.
With the abundance of ready to use opensource solutions, I'm sure most devs don't need to implement infinite scroll or a pagination mechanism themselves but they just use a component that does it out of the box and solves all those technical problems for them.
To be sure what works best for your users and type of content, I would do two versions, one with pagination and one with infinite scroll and let the numbers decide which technique makes the user click / visit content and maybe which technique does the user spend most time on the website.
I'm not totally against infinite scroll, for a social network news feed I think it's a good use case. Also all the potential problems listed have a solution and also some of the problems also exist when using a pagination. For example letting a user bookmark a page url with a pagenumber on a website with lots of new content is bad, as the content on the page number XY will have changed after few hours / days. Some good solutions if you really want to implement it on your own are listed in this google blog post: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-se...
My "favorite" infinite scrolling fail is when there is a footer on the site, and it keeps being pushed down by the infinite loading of new data, such that you can't reach any of the links the footer contains (like, you know, "About" or things like that).
Bonus points if you go on to click on the footer, the infinite scroll kicks in, and your mouse cursor ends up on a link in the newly loaded text, which you end up clicking on. (Or video content, or whatever ends up doing something because you clicked)
And then you click to go back and it doesn't resume where you were before, and instead dumps you right back up at the top, with none of the previously loaded content available.
Or in the case of Facebook, a new top, one that intentionally excludes whatever you were looking at before (because "it has been read" - even though you got no more than a glimpse in frustrated passing).
Yes. FTA, "Website visitors have been taught that a footer is placed at the bottom with information such as contact, about us, privacy policy and so on."
Bonus points when that info actually still lives there but is now rendered inaccessible, violating the actual laws their presence is intended to comply with.
E.g. in Germany the impressum (often also called "imprint" in English versions of German websites; a mandatory page listing the physical address, contact information, registration numbers and other legal information, typically linked in the footer) must be easy to find and accessible with no more than two clicks (though this seems to be more of a heuristic than a strict legal definition).
Was wondering that and then told myself, come on, nobody would be that evil, the whole idea is nonsense. And you're suggesting there are websites out there that actually do that?
Google (image search) and Facebook (news feed) have both done this. Last time it came up I was able to find a screen shot of one of them but not the other, let me see if I can dig that up.
I don't think they did it deliberately, but I'd bet someone said "We could increase engagement if people didn't have to click anything to keep seeing more content" and nobody bothered to think about other design consequences of automatically expanding the content downward forever.
I have seen this multiple times. It's almost certainly out of ignorance, and not intentional. Just someone trying to implement a slick UI without really thinking it through.
None of the sites that I use that have infinite scroll have a footer worth mentioning. Can you point out a site? That seems more like just bad coding than a problem with infinite scroll.
Maybe it's just me because I just realized how irritating it is, but I really dislike when the title of an article commands me to do something. I don't really even understand why people do it, is it supposed to make me hate-click the link? It just makes me think the author is juvenile and i lose interest.
I think it's to draw the attention of people who want to tell others to do the same thing. E.g. if you're saying the title of this article internally while looking at an infinite-scrolling web site, then the title will get your attention.
I’d like to see the browser APIs prohibit this - and also disable interference with text selecting and copy/paste buffer. There is no legit reason for this functionality.
I think it would be very difficult to make something like Google docs or the rich text compose options in a new email without the ability to trigger actions on text selection and clipboard.
What I would like to see is a permission though, like when browsers ask for your location: "This site want's to manipulate your clipboard. Allow?"
If we could go back in time and redesign everything from a clean slate, we really should just have different formats and client apps for “run portable apps with rich GUIs over the Internet” and “view text with clickable links embedded.”
How could you change browser APIs to block infinite scrolling? It boils down to making a network request and adding html elements. You can't disable those since they're using significantly outside of infinite scrolling.
The best way to block it would be to provide direct support for it. Rather than each site rewrite the user experience with Javascript, the browser could support a standard paginated HTML. Then it could render that as infinite scroll, or pagination, at the user's preference.
Now that the Javascript genie is out of the bottle, you can't stop single-page apps from doing their own navigation. But if you make it simple enough for developers, many new sites will choose to support a standard HTML feature rather than continue to manage it themselves.
That would, of course, take time and be the usual HTML-evolution clusterf*. But if Google or Mozilla decided to start it, in conjunction with one or a few major blog/social-media providers, it could probably be widely supported within a decade.
Paging should be incorporated into web standards. Imagine your browser indicating "you are on page 2 of 8". Imagine having browser hotkeys for "next page", "previous page" and "jump to page".
The browser itself could even provide a non-broken, customisable, universal-across-all-sites implementation of infinite scrolling.
I remember from ~10-15 years ago, in the Opera browser there was a button to go foward even when you did not go backwards. It was pretty good at guessing what the next page was going to be (example.com/1.html > 2.html, 2005-08.jpg > 2005-09.jpg etc.)
I have a “+1” bookmarklet with a similar goal. It’s not very smart, just finds the last number in a URL and increments it, but that’s usually good enough.
The "works in" browser icons gives some idea of the date on that. IE, Phoenix, Netscape 4, and Opera. Probably some of the oldest still-in-use javascript in the world :P
Ran it through prettier.io:
javascript: (function() {
var e, s;
IB = 1;
function isDigit(c) {
return "0" <= c && c <= "9";
}
L = location.href;
LL = L.length;
for (e = LL - 1; e >= 0; --e)
if (isDigit(L.charAt(e))) {
for (s = e - 1; s >= 0; --s) if (!isDigit(L.charAt(s))) break;
break;
}
++s;
if (e < 0) return;
oldNum = L.substring(s, e + 1);
newNum = "" + (parseInt(oldNum, 10) + IB);
while (newNum.length < oldNum.length) newNum = "0" + newNum;
location.href = L.substring(0, s) + newNum + L.slice(e + 1);
})();
The feature was called fast forwarding, and old Opera's successor Vivaldi still has it. For those unfamiliar with it, it also works with more complex pagination schemes than just incrementing the number at the end; e.g. Google or Bing searches.
I remember Opera also had (and Vivaldi has, I just found) an optional feature where continuing to press space after reaching the end of the page would trigger fast-forward and take you to the next page. Sort of an alternative way of infinite scrolling.
The problem is that browser windows have different sizes, so pages will be of different size. Formatting a document to fit on a page size is not rocket-science but also not trivial to do nicely.
Then implement it with elements rather than pages. Regardless of how many elements fit on a page, you could then get a reference to the page that begins at element 12345 in a given sort ordering, and come back and continue from there at any point or on some other device.
There are definitely sites (usually documentation) where I can press Alt-N to get to the next page and Alt-P to get to the previous one and I have no idea how that happens.
If you use vimium or similar browser extensions for mouse-free access, they have keybinding for paging. It's not perfect, but it's still better than nothing.
For the curious, Vimium looks for these by default: prev,previous,back,older,<,‹,←,«,≪,<< next,more,newer,>,›,→,»,≫,>>. I have been using it for a month now and it works surprisingly well.
The article puts forth 10 reasons to think twice before implementing infinite scrolling, but many of them are just a variation of the final reason: Terrible user experience.
For the sake of argument, there are several very successful websites that use infinite scrolling in one way or another. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit just to name a few. Is infinite scrolling on these sites disorienting the user? hard to navigate? rendering a "terrible user experience"? One could certainly argue that the data says otherwise.
The article doesn't even suggest that there might be situations where infinite scrolling might befit the site. I'm not a big fan of infinite scroll but black-and-white rants like this often leave out the vital context and nuances in the topic they aim to analyze.
Facebook's is compounded by the mysterious newsfeed algorithm - if you're infinite scrolling a limited set of items in chronological order it wouldn't be as bad. But I've seen things in my newsfeed and then not been able to find them again if I accidentally closed or reloaded my tab.
If you noted who posted/shared it you can find it on their profile, but if all you noticed was the headline or image on a shared item it might as well be gone forever once you lose your place in the feed.
I wouldn't say that's the main reason I don't check my Facebook feed anymore, but it's one of them.
infinite scrolling of a limited set of items wouldn't be very true to the name ;-)
I agree with the problem of finding something again in a long, cryptically ordered list of several hundreds or thousands of items. Not sure a paginated facebook feed would solve that issue though
I mean limited in terms of quantity posted per day; my understanding of Facebook's system is that across all of my friends (or maybe even friends of friends?) there's a lot of stuff posted, and Facebook only picks a subset of to actually show me. I don't know how they decide which things appear in my newsfeed and I don't know what order they're in.
Compared to Instagram where I see every single thing that someone I follow posts (might be because I follow so few people on it). If I want to go back and see one of the posts again, I scroll back in time and eventually find it.
For losing posts on Facebook I’m not talking about trying to find something from a month ago, I’m talking about things that I swear I saw yesterday and now I can’t find it.
Yep facebooks algorithm could be totally superceded by "I would like to see ....
[ ] only friends
[ ] mostly friends, some lists
[ ] random
[ ] don't care, use your AI/algorithm
choose one of the above.
The infinite scroll is one of the reasons those websites are so addictive. My lizard brain has a hard time closing the tab when I "haven't reached the end of the page yet."
So it may be 'good' for keeping people on the site. But in the grand scheme of things I'd rather the page had a bottom.
This. These sites don't use infinite scrolling because it is a great user experience they do it to keep people on their site. They do it to keep people engaged. The addiction. Most of those sites would actually be better with pages in terms of user experience, but that isn't the experience they are going for.
I think Instagram does a fairly good job of trying to have both. When you've scrolled through all the new posts, you get a green "You're all caught up" break point. You can continue scrolling past it if you want.
Facebook's feed is horrible. People are lost all the time with it, and it's a huge impediment for the site to be used for anything remotely serious. Ditto for Instagram, but expectations here are more aligned with nothing serious ever getting on the site.
Twitter would be better without infinite scrolling, but nobody ever cares about messages down the line, so it's not that bad. I have never noticed that Reddit does it. Is it on the new design only? This may be one of the reasons people do not use the new design.
I'm not certain if the new design does it. The old one certainly doesn't, but RES[1] adds the functionality, and has a large user base. I often mix up native features and what RES has added
I’d say that Facebook’s feed is very difficult to use, and often finding an item that you were looking at earlier in a session can often be very difficult, if not impossible.
There's a plug-in called RedditEnhancementSuite (RES) that adds infinite scrolling with the URL bar being modified. RES has a pretty large userbase and it's well done so OP probably uses it and just forgot what's base Reddit and what's RES.
Infinite scrolling depends on Javascript. NoScript prevents it.
FaceTwitGram may depend on IS; I don't know, I've never used a FaceTwitGram account. Reddit seems to work fine without Javascript.
If I'm forced to enable Javascript for some specific site, I enable it for that site, then (if that's not enough) for it's companion sites, CDN and so on. By this time the site has already caused me resentment.
If that's not enough, then usually I've already gone somewhere else.
Way too many sites will give you a blank screen just because JS is disabled. But if you insist that I totally drop my pants and enable ALL scripts, you really have to have a compelling reason (e.g. buy product unavailable elsewhere, um err can't think of any other compelling reason; luckily neither my bank nor the taxman mandate 3rd-party scripts).
Some UI gimmick such as infinite scrolling is certainly not a compelling reason.
The purpose of infinite scrolling is to retain the eyeballs of mobile users - to stop them navigating away from your site. I am old, my eyes are dim, and my fingers are shaky; I use my mobile phone primarily as a phone, and never as a browser. Younger folk may have a different experience.
Infinite scrolling in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit doesn't exist to improve the user experience, but to make these sites addictive. Different priorities here.
Yea, I dislike infinite scrolling because I'm a user, but these sites love infinite scrolling because there is no barrier to continuing to browse, in ye olden days there would be a load time when clicking onto the next page - in the modern world performance is likely not a concern or the next page is already loaded and just swapped out in the current view - but it is still disorienting to the user as that action will usually shift their view.
Interestingly the approach I think works the best (except for the poor input experience on anything that isn't a touch screen) is infinite horizontal scrolling since the footer and header elements remain expectedly stable while not overlapping any information the user wants to view... horizontal scrolling is very poorly supported by input devices and using the scroll wheel to move left/right makes the user think too much.
> in ye olden days there would be a load time when clicking onto the next page - in the modern world performance is likely not a concern or the next page is already loaded and just swapped out in the current view - but it is still disorienting to the user as that action will usually shift their view.
Oh, but there is a visible load time still. Unless you're browsing on a supercomputer with infinite RAM, after a minute or two of scrolling Facebook you'll realize the performance drops fast with the amount of feed you've loaded, while the load times increase. In my experience, both the page slowdown and load delays are about O(n) with respect to the side of the feed, but I haven't measured it precisely.
>For the sake of argument, there are several very successful websites that use infinite scrolling in one way or another. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit just to name a few.
Comcast is a very successful company. Do they have a great user experience?
>I guess they had a lot better user experience than their failed competitors.
That's like the logic that Microsoft Windows must be great just because it's the most-used operating system. You're completely ignoring all the other factors that are involved in a company or product getting to a dominant position.
Well there are some arguments to be made that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are terrible for their users. I am going to assume you are familiar with these arguments because you are on this site. Perhaps infinite scrolling contributes to whatever is so powerfully bad about these sites for their users, if indeed those arguments are correct.
> many of them are just a variation of the final reason: Terrible user experience.
If we're playing Architecture Astronaut, that's true of every possible issue. Compiler crash? Security hole? Deleted all user data? All merely variations of "terrible user experience".
> several very successful websites that use infinite scrolling in one way or another. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit just to name a few.
Yes, all sites which first took several years to build up a massive user base and benefit greatly from network effects. Most websites are not Facebook. 20 years ago, it was "But Microsoft does it!" -- and the response was "But you're not Microsoft."
I'd love to find out how many people use "old.reddit.com" specifically to avoid infinite scrolling.
> Is infinite scrolling on these sites disorienting the user? hard to navigate? rendering a "terrible user experience"? One could certainly argue that the data says otherwise.
What data, exactly? Yes, I do think it's disorienting, hard, and terrible, and I hear similar complaints all the time. If I had a nickel for every time I clicked something by mistake in Facebook, or clicked "back" and wasn't taken back to what I was looking at before, I'd have ... a big ol' jar of nickels, anyway.
> The article doesn't even suggest that there might be situations where infinite scrolling might befit the site.
You're right. These are 10 reasons it's bad for users. There's one obvious one that benefits the site: because there's no obvious stopping point, it's great for sites that want to be addictive. People eat more if they have a infinite bowl [1], too. If there's any user benefit to infinite scrolling, I have not heard it.
My issue is that infinite scrolling, especially on media rich websites, leads to a massive increase in RAM usage for no real increase in functionality.
Not being used by social media, I don't come across infinite scrolling much. But where I do it's most annoying. Discourse: how dare you take over my ctrl-f keyboard shortcut.
That's a great example of the extra magic and complexity an infinitely scrolled view requires. As you scroll down a huge Discord thread, they are removing posts from the DOM for performance reasons.
You could use the browser's built-in search functionality by choosing Edit -> Find in This Page from your browser's toolbar, but in this case it would be pointless as the results would be inconsistent as most data you've come past is not present.
I'm curious how much worse the performance would be if they did not apply this specific optimization.
I remember reading a thread about this issue on Discourse's own board, and it was clear the continuous scrolling was non-negotiable "because modish", regardless of user preferences or experience.
> I'm curious how much worse the performance would be if they did not apply this specific optimization.
Pages without continuous scrolling that can have large numbers of posts or entries don't typically show all by default. There are all the usual options - paging, allowing the user to choose the number per page, etc. They're all imperfect workarounds, and all better (for me) than continuous scrolling.
... but I like infinite scrolling. I just don't like infinite content.
I prefer having a webshop list everything they have in a sub instead of pagination. I prefer Amazon layout which just goes on and on with all kind of stuff related to an item. I like to be able to ctrl-f on a page and see if I hit what I need without clicking through mazes of links. I just don't like pages that just generate more content after I finished the current one in the hope I get bored and click on ads.
I remember when Google Reader came along was probably the first time I saw infinite scrolling and it was glorious! The best thing ever! I don't want my RSS feeds any other way!
The article is flawed, because for example it takes for granted that the footer needs to scroll with the infinite scrollable content pane, which is just an absurd thought to begin with. Similar statements hold true for memory management, of course a naive implementation will eventually fill memory, but the same is true for a bad implementation of an single page web app with paging UI. Same for bookmarks, of course if you bookmark page 1 of a multi page list, eventually the articles you saw will be pushed to page 2. And if you have a single page application and forget to have the url change to the articles you read, you will have issues, on the other hand if you read an article in an infinite loading list, it would be no problem to change the url as you read articles and make them linkable. If you take away all of these statements you end up with the following:
a) it is easier to mess up infinite scrolling than to mess up paging, don't think its easy or you can build it quickly 'on the side'.
(my take on that point is) -> We need better best practices and tooling to build infinite scolling for popular frontend frameworks. In my opinion it is on the level of complexity as building a state library such as redux including the react integrations and redux tooling and needs a similar amount of contributors, support, application feedback, bug reports etc. until it can provide a satisfactory mainstream user experience.
b) the article traps into the same mistake most medium/hackernoon articles make: not more explicitly discriminating between real web apps and web pages that just happen to use a js framework. A real web app is something like calender, mailclient, taks, slack, fb messenger, trello etc. They have completely different requirements and expectations and it would be absurd to click to older pages of messages on slack and is really annoying to do so in gmail. Even though the article just mentions the term "web site", it does sell its advice as a kind of universal truth independent of context. For a web page, something like new york times or medium articles or some informational page for a company offering, i agree that especially autoloading of next articles at the end of one opened post can be really annoying and in the context of articles infinite scrolling is even easier to get wrong, but not because of an universal law, but because the user interface has more things to take into consideration and requires better planning.
Will read the article once home, but for now I have this rule of thumb: if data is of streaming nature & short time valued, infinite scroll, else always pagination. So far worked for me (:
209 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadThe question is, is this the best use of your time? Are you willing to invest more time in it when you give it to the user? Because the user will do something you haven't thought of, they will break it, and you will need to fix it.
Which may now be obsolete. Over the last year firefox has implemented some amazing flexbox layout computation improvements that make appending to a flexbox with many elements (>5k) stay fast. It only re-computes the changed ones.
Of course you need to do some profiling to check that you don't accidentally deviate from the happy path by introducing changes that touch all elements.
I noticed when trying to screenshot a Twitter thread in Firefox that twitter does this, on the mobile site at least.
Although to be "fair", that's probably largely intentional crippling of the site to push users towards their app.
The thing that irritates me a lot with infinite scrolling is that it ruins history. If the content somehow botches open in new tab then this basically constrains the user to only ever see one piece of detail before getting crazy.
I have no idea what you mean by indexing, given the word index doesn't feature in the article. You also ignore the problems of making the scrollbar useless & the footer unreachable. I don't see any fix for those issues at all.
These criticisms are all really bad
Somehow the web has evolved to a place where the poles of infinite scroll and excessively short pages are two of the great annoyances.
Honestly scrolling on mobile gets me halfway to a repetitive stress injury, I’ll take a next button anyday
if there were a single piece of paper long enough to hold the entirety of a book, and it were written out on that page, would that make it any less of a book? it may not be one in the sense that it is no longer bound together, but at the same time, in the former example the pages were bound together by some chemical process into one monolithic page; the only thing missing is a cover to hold it together, though I have seen college textbooks come as just loose leaf paper that one has to bind themselves but that's still a "book" prior to binding.
also: what if a story or some such were to be written on a scroll? just because it doesn't fit the precise literal definition of what a book is, doesn't mean it doesn't contain the same semiotic substance as "book" and as such doesn't mean that it automatically isn't one. but maybe im just being pedantic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(I'm wondering if you think the objection is to scrolling, it's not, there is a difference between a long page with scroll bars that give an indication on how far you are on the page, and infinite scrolling where the page gets longer each time you read the end of the page)
From dictionary, book: "a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers."
I wrote a quick and dirty script to address this annoyance.
It can be used to output a table of all the video urls and video titles for any YouTube channel.
"yy032" and "yy025" are some utilities I wrote to decode html and transform urls to HTTP for HTTP/1.1 pipelining, respectively.1 Instead of using yy025 and openssl, one could alternatively make a separate TCP connection for each HTTP request, e.g., using something like curl. Personally, I prefer not to make lots of connections when retrieving mutiple pages from the same domain.
Here is a hypothetical example of how to use the script, "1.sh", to make a table of all the video urls and video titles in a channel.
1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17689165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17689152I wish i could turn it off like tumblr
This is so annoying to me that I have JavaScript and cookies disabled for techcrunch just to circumvent this nonsensical behaviour.
Um.....
Adds?
how does someone mess up their website that badly? i dont even know how something like that is possible
With the abundance of ready to use opensource solutions, I'm sure most devs don't need to implement infinite scroll or a pagination mechanism themselves but they just use a component that does it out of the box and solves all those technical problems for them.
To be sure what works best for your users and type of content, I would do two versions, one with pagination and one with infinite scroll and let the numbers decide which technique makes the user click / visit content and maybe which technique does the user spend most time on the website.
I'm not totally against infinite scroll, for a social network news feed I think it's a good use case. Also all the potential problems listed have a solution and also some of the problems also exist when using a pagination. For example letting a user bookmark a page url with a pagenumber on a website with lots of new content is bad, as the content on the page number XY will have changed after few hours / days. Some good solutions if you really want to implement it on your own are listed in this google blog post: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-se...
E.g. in Germany the impressum (often also called "imprint" in English versions of German websites; a mandatory page listing the physical address, contact information, registration numbers and other legal information, typically linked in the footer) must be easy to find and accessible with no more than two clicks (though this seems to be more of a heuristic than a strict legal definition).
I don't think they did it deliberately, but I'd bet someone said "We could increase engagement if people didn't have to click anything to keep seeing more content" and nobody bothered to think about other design consequences of automatically expanding the content downward forever.
EDIT: A screenshot of Facebook's in mid-2013 is shown here under the "Unreachable" header https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/05/infinite-scrolling-...
Or straight to the image: https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42...
https://oldnavy.gap.com/
They have useful info in the footer. But it's impossible to get to the footer.
it's insane
What I would like to see is a permission though, like when browsers ask for your location: "This site want's to manipulate your clipboard. Allow?"
Now that the Javascript genie is out of the bottle, you can't stop single-page apps from doing their own navigation. But if you make it simple enough for developers, many new sites will choose to support a standard HTML feature rather than continue to manage it themselves.
That would, of course, take time and be the usual HTML-evolution clusterf*. But if Google or Mozilla decided to start it, in conjunction with one or a few major blog/social-media providers, it could probably be widely supported within a decade.
No signs from other vendors than Chrome though.
The browser itself could even provide a non-broken, customisable, universal-across-all-sites implementation of infinite scrolling.
If you're curious, the implementation is here: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/quteb...
The "works in" browser icons gives some idea of the date on that. IE, Phoenix, Netscape 4, and Opera. Probably some of the oldest still-in-use javascript in the world :P
Ran it through prettier.io:
I remember Opera also had (and Vivaldi has, I just found) an optional feature where continuing to press space after reaching the end of the page would trigger fast-forward and take you to the next page. Sort of an alternative way of infinite scrolling.
For the sake of argument, there are several very successful websites that use infinite scrolling in one way or another. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit just to name a few. Is infinite scrolling on these sites disorienting the user? hard to navigate? rendering a "terrible user experience"? One could certainly argue that the data says otherwise.
The article doesn't even suggest that there might be situations where infinite scrolling might befit the site. I'm not a big fan of infinite scroll but black-and-white rants like this often leave out the vital context and nuances in the topic they aim to analyze.
If you noted who posted/shared it you can find it on their profile, but if all you noticed was the headline or image on a shared item it might as well be gone forever once you lose your place in the feed.
I wouldn't say that's the main reason I don't check my Facebook feed anymore, but it's one of them.
I agree with the problem of finding something again in a long, cryptically ordered list of several hundreds or thousands of items. Not sure a paginated facebook feed would solve that issue though
Compared to Instagram where I see every single thing that someone I follow posts (might be because I follow so few people on it). If I want to go back and see one of the posts again, I scroll back in time and eventually find it.
For losing posts on Facebook I’m not talking about trying to find something from a month ago, I’m talking about things that I swear I saw yesterday and now I can’t find it.
Like, I follow some newspapers on fb, an often they only show up once per day, reload the feed and it’s vanished.
This is actually what facebook does when you're offline. When it runs out of content to show, it cycles round and shows you the same content again.
So it may be 'good' for keeping people on the site. But in the grand scheme of things I'd rather the page had a bottom.
Twitter would be better without infinite scrolling, but nobody ever cares about messages down the line, so it's not that bad. I have never noticed that Reddit does it. Is it on the new design only? This may be one of the reasons people do not use the new design.
[1] https://redditenhancementsuite.com/
Seems about par for the course for a Hacker Noon post. They're not meant to be read, they're meant to pad the career of the author.
The new redesign also adds infinite scrolling.
FaceTwitGram may depend on IS; I don't know, I've never used a FaceTwitGram account. Reddit seems to work fine without Javascript.
If I'm forced to enable Javascript for some specific site, I enable it for that site, then (if that's not enough) for it's companion sites, CDN and so on. By this time the site has already caused me resentment.
If that's not enough, then usually I've already gone somewhere else.
Way too many sites will give you a blank screen just because JS is disabled. But if you insist that I totally drop my pants and enable ALL scripts, you really have to have a compelling reason (e.g. buy product unavailable elsewhere, um err can't think of any other compelling reason; luckily neither my bank nor the taxman mandate 3rd-party scripts).
Some UI gimmick such as infinite scrolling is certainly not a compelling reason.
The purpose of infinite scrolling is to retain the eyeballs of mobile users - to stop them navigating away from your site. I am old, my eyes are dim, and my fingers are shaky; I use my mobile phone primarily as a phone, and never as a browser. Younger folk may have a different experience.
Interestingly the approach I think works the best (except for the poor input experience on anything that isn't a touch screen) is infinite horizontal scrolling since the footer and header elements remain expectedly stable while not overlapping any information the user wants to view... horizontal scrolling is very poorly supported by input devices and using the scroll wheel to move left/right makes the user think too much.
Oh, but there is a visible load time still. Unless you're browsing on a supercomputer with infinite RAM, after a minute or two of scrolling Facebook you'll realize the performance drops fast with the amount of feed you've loaded, while the load times increase. In my experience, both the page slowdown and load delays are about O(n) with respect to the side of the feed, but I haven't measured it precisely.
In the case of reddit, infinite scrolling is one of the most common reasons I hear used to explain why other users opted out of Reddit's new UI.
the problem is people who cargo-cult Facebook and use infinite scrolling in their business apps which don't have ads
Comcast is a very successful company. Do they have a great user experience?
What I meant was that some of the worlds most popular sites employ "infinite" scrolling, and it kind of makes sense on those sites.
If they have a great user experience? That's highly subjective. I guess they had a lot better user experience than their failed competitors.
That's like the logic that Microsoft Windows must be great just because it's the most-used operating system. You're completely ignoring all the other factors that are involved in a company or product getting to a dominant position.
infinite scroll limits the amount of data downloaded over mobile, without forcing you to "click" to next page.
it used to be absurdly user hostile but now it's limited to 2 loads before it stops and you are presented with a page index.
it's a great compromise with a great underlying UX reason.
Which I have a strong suspicion they are.
If we're playing Architecture Astronaut, that's true of every possible issue. Compiler crash? Security hole? Deleted all user data? All merely variations of "terrible user experience".
> several very successful websites that use infinite scrolling in one way or another. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit just to name a few.
Yes, all sites which first took several years to build up a massive user base and benefit greatly from network effects. Most websites are not Facebook. 20 years ago, it was "But Microsoft does it!" -- and the response was "But you're not Microsoft."
I'd love to find out how many people use "old.reddit.com" specifically to avoid infinite scrolling.
> Is infinite scrolling on these sites disorienting the user? hard to navigate? rendering a "terrible user experience"? One could certainly argue that the data says otherwise.
What data, exactly? Yes, I do think it's disorienting, hard, and terrible, and I hear similar complaints all the time. If I had a nickel for every time I clicked something by mistake in Facebook, or clicked "back" and wasn't taken back to what I was looking at before, I'd have ... a big ol' jar of nickels, anyway.
> The article doesn't even suggest that there might be situations where infinite scrolling might befit the site.
You're right. These are 10 reasons it's bad for users. There's one obvious one that benefits the site: because there's no obvious stopping point, it's great for sites that want to be addictive. People eat more if they have a infinite bowl [1], too. If there's any user benefit to infinite scrolling, I have not heard it.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15761167
You could use the browser's built-in search functionality by choosing Edit -> Find in This Page from your browser's toolbar, but in this case it would be pointless as the results would be inconsistent as most data you've come past is not present.
I'm curious how much worse the performance would be if they did not apply this specific optimization.
Here's a thread with 618 replies, for example: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/crate-of-the-week/2704
> I'm curious how much worse the performance would be if they did not apply this specific optimization.
Pages without continuous scrolling that can have large numbers of posts or entries don't typically show all by default. There are all the usual options - paging, allowing the user to choose the number per page, etc. They're all imperfect workarounds, and all better (for me) than continuous scrolling.
I think photo blogs are a good place to use infinite scroll.
I prefer having a webshop list everything they have in a sub instead of pagination. I prefer Amazon layout which just goes on and on with all kind of stuff related to an item. I like to be able to ctrl-f on a page and see if I hit what I need without clicking through mazes of links. I just don't like pages that just generate more content after I finished the current one in the hope I get bored and click on ads.
But for anything else? Not so much.