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> quickly scroll through a list of up to 100000 messages.

You can do this with JS and HTML. There are some popular small JS libs that do just that.

It works like this: it creates a div with a very big "height" value to get the scrollbar look like there is a long list, and JS just loads in the visible area plus a few items above and below, and reloads data as you scroll. It works very good in Chrome and Firefox, and even okay in IE11.

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Does it still work well if I click-drag the scrollbar very quickly from the top to the middle or bottom of the list? Or if I use a keyboard shortcut to jump immediately to beginning or end?

They actually talk about this a little way deeper into the thread. Here is a prototype they made

http://benbucksch.github.io/trex/fastlist-test.html

Yes, that's the point. The div is a normal HTML element with a normal scrollbar.

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