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Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

When I press page-down I want to scroll a page down immediately, not wait 250ms before eventually arriving at a page down. Page-down always scrolls the same distance, so you don't need any hints about how it scrolled; you just move your eyes the same way you always do. If something is messing with the scrolling to make it act in a confusing way (I think Javascript might allow this), that doesn't mean you should use animation to help people understand the confusing behavior, it means you should fix the bug that allows the confusing behavior.

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1. 250ms is not quickly, on Firefox Windows a default page down animation is closer to 50-100ms (estimating), it's so fast you hardly even realize it's animating. There are websites that override this with their custom slow animations - those type of page downs suck yes, hence my inclusion of quickly in my first post.

2. Page down doesn't always scroll the same distance when you hit the end of the page, unless you have over-scrolling like some code editors do but websites and browsers don't.

For media naturally represented as pages, like PDF or images, and when one whole page fits on a screen there's a different story though, there it's nice to be able to jump pages instantly without animations, because the page boundary itself can be used as reference. But for reflowing endless wall of text media like web pages and code you kindof need to follow your previous position as a reference.

> When I press page-down I want to scroll a page down immediately

You are among a tiny minority and come off as trying really hard when insisting that animations are useless. Very few people want a 0ms screen flash on page scroll.

There's no "screen flash" with a non-animated page scroll if done correctly. I'm not complaining about double buffering.

Nobody is talking about double buffering. We’re talking about non-animated page scroll, which instantly replaces content with other content, a preference that you share with very few people.

Citation of a UI study showing that preference? And was it with inexperienced or experienced users?

There are many other people in this HN discussion expressing a preference for fast interfaces over animated interfaces.

Literally nobody thought your next response would be anything but “CITE???!?”. You and your kind are entirely predictable: Disguise a minority opinion as an objective truth then shift the burden to anyone who calls you out.

Nobody in this thread besides you has expressed a desire for a 0ms scroll. Nobody.

False.

JoshMnem: "The proper way to use animation is to NOT use it except when there is absolutely no other way to communicate something." (scrolling is communicated by the fact that you pressed the page-down button)

yorwba: "The first time, the effect would be made very obvious; but with continued use, it becomes so fast that it's instant."

iforgotpassword: "I usually try to disable animation entirely"

th0m4s: "On my last phone I turned the animations off complete"

kqr: "I turn off animations entirely on my phones, and when watching others use their phones I'm always baffled by how slow they feel."

devgutt: "You can also don't use animation at all. I really don't like animations even when used correctly."

Ah yes, that well-known and beloved feature of the iPhone: the page scroll button. This is pretty sad and weird of you dude.

Only half those comments were about phones, so even if those posters would make an exception to their stated animation preference in the case of page-down, "literally nobody" is false. If wanting low-latency scrolling is "sad and weird", why does Mozilla expose this option in Firefox's main Preferences page? They have no compunctions moving genuinely rare preferences to about:config or removing them altogether.

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