Microsoft Edge Experimenting with a Super Duper Secure Mode

The pagination is a nice break and lets me know I am done, everything on back pages has been previously processed.

A better case for infinite scrolling would be chat history, where you'd want an entirely separate UI widget for "jump to date", with bidirectional infinite scroll that unloads distant content, and a way to grab permalinks. Missing any one of those features, or the fact that messages will never be re-ordered for marketing purposes, infinite scrolling becomes a hinderance.

Finite scroll is a compromise that you get some amount "you are here" context from scrollbar thumb size and position. If you are interrupted you can generally visually guess about where you left off, maybe.

Infinite scroll is terrible tool for an inbox because you no longer have such context. Scroll too far and the scrollbar thumb changes size because new items came into view. Most infinite scrolls entirely hide the scrollbar thumb because it is precisely so useless. Try to resume where you were in your inbox after an interruption and you have no idea how far to scroll down, and you can't just use the scrollbar thumb and hit an approximate spot. You have no context for where you are, you are lost in an infinitely scrolling maze of items all alike.

Even if infinite scroll wasn't a dark pattern (and it is, there's enough behavioral psychology studies now that have gathered enough evidence that infinite scroll feeds addictive behaviors), it is a terrible tool to work with if you are trying to get stuff done. It has none of the context of "you are here" and "here's how you can come back to where you were if you need to leave". Both of those things contribute to why it is such a dark pattern. Both of those reasons are strong reasons why it is an anti-pattern anywhere you expect people to work/to get stuff done. Pagination is great for getting work done and infinite scroll is awful. Finite scroll is alright compromise between the two for some apps.

That algorithm breaks on infinite scroll.

Of course why would you have a problem with that, the only navigation one should perform while reading is change chaper, who wants to go to abitrary paragraphs.

There is a sizeable subset of people who are curious and do care, and who would be eager to try that "one weird trick that speeds up <hot web property du jour> 200%" spreading through their Telegram group.

But for the most part, non-technologically inclined people seem to have a Hindu cow-like frustration tolerance when it comes to technology. If Windows takes twelve minutes to boot and your browsers viewport has shrunken to the size of a postage stamp due to toolbars, then that's just the way it is.

I would wager that for them, site Y running half as fast as site X matters a lot less than you think.

There are lots of things could be done to even the playing field. Eg require all browsers to come “out of the box” with with zero sites trusted.

This would incentivise regular sites to not use heavy JS, if they knew they won’t be JITed by default.

And by all means, if you use say Salesforce, by all means trust the site. But that tiny bit of friction is a good thing imho, analogous to running ‘chmod +x’ on Unix.

In general, I think it’s time to say that browsers should have a more refined security model, and letting every darn site on the internet access to run code on your computer is maybe not a great idea.