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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

Out of interest, why? I find infinite scroll a pareto improvement (an improvement with no downsides)

On mobile it might be. On Desktop it (1) devalues the scrollbar, since you can no longer use its size in proportion to its container to judge how large the page is compared with your view of it, and (2) adds jank while the next set of results is loaded (the pause while loading feels random rather than an expected event in response to your changing page).

The other thing that's annoying me is the overriding of cursor keys, making each scrolling step much larger than it would normally be. Yes, it might be more logical for a keypress to step to the next result, but that's not how the cursor keys are expected to behave in the browser, so it's jarring.

> On mobile it might be. On Desktop it (1) devalues the scrollbar, since you can no longer use its size in proportion to its container to judge how large the page is compared with your view of it, and (2) adds jank while the next set of results is loaded (the pause while loading feels random rather than an expected event in response to your changing page).The other thing that's annoying me is the overriding of cursor keys, making each scrolling step much larger than it would normally be. Yes, it might be more logical for a keypress to step to the next result, but that's not how the cursor keys are expected to behave in the browser, so it's jarring.

I can't really speak to the benefit for a search engine, but for our app we opted to keep actual pages because it allows users to remember approximately where some content is and go directly to that page.

Heh, a pareto improvement is "a new situation where some agents will gain, and no agents will lose"

I get your meaning but it's kind of a funny phrase to mean "no downsides to this one agent, me"

One example can be resources and efficiency. One time I was trying to browse Google Fonts to find something in a certain visual style (ie not something you can really search for via keywords). It made Chrome completely unresponsive after a little while. This was a few years back so maybe it’s better now, but I’ve seen similar slowdown on other sites.

A more human reason is that personally, I like to portion out and chunk off parts as no longer requiring my attention. I read a page and move on, clear the mental cache and start again. Infinite scrolls can mess with my focus.

For keyboard users it acts as a focus trap, breaking the expected interaction model of the page. You can’t ever reach the footer, at least until the results stop.

Is there a footer on infinite-scroll google?

There is. After 4-5 pages of loading Google gave up and showed me a “More search results” button with a footer below it, along with the legally required things like a link to the privacy policy. But who knows whether it’ll be 4-5 pages in the future?

This is a common problem with infinite scroll websites, not just Google of course.

It does ruin the back button

Because I can skip tons of pages, I can go back to the same page later.

Why would you ever skip a page of search results?

If you are using the exact same search terms you have used dozens of times, then you likely know what the first few pages of results are, and may want to skip to where you previously left off in your search.

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