Ability to turn off endless scrolling

Endless scrolling seems cool and all until everything slows to a crawl because you're 20,000px down the page and Chrome has consumed all the RAM, murdering your hard drive with excessive swapping because you just want to catch up on the last couple of days' posts. The site seems to unload images that go off the top of the page but that doesn't stop browsers from rendering the 18,000px of mostly empty space.

Heya,

We've discussed this internally and think that offering real pagination is something probably best left until after launch. Instead, we're considering performance and usability improvements (eg, when you hit 'back', it goes to where you were at) to make the existing functionality more useful and usable for now.

Obviously if we get more votes for this and it floats to the top of our feature list, we'll consider bumping it up some more!

Please consider putting the cursor state for the endless scrolling into the url (history API) so that I can bookmark and resume looking at results later, or send them to someone.

Any improvement to make back/forward browser navigation do the right thing would be welcome, however. The experience using Safari in private browsing mode is awful right now. (Open something in a new tab? New cookie jar, log in again! Open it in the same tab? Lose your state in the search!)

I hope it gets optimized, as currently it's a massive memory hog after scrolling a little while like most endless scrolling is.

https://dannysu.com/2012/07/07/infinite-scroll-memory-optimization/ has some investigation on how to deal with that memory problem in general, not sure how comprehensive it is, but it looked very promising.

I'm a 32 bit peasant, which means that infinite scrolling means that for me, I can only scroll so far before my browser hits the 2gb RAM limit and crashes. It also means that it isn't saved to my browser history: if I click on anything and navigate away from my position in the scrolling list, I have to reload the whole thing all over again.

I hope something gets fixed before launch. Currently I am unable to look at the Artwork page without the page freezing, and having to close it entirely and open a new tab. Whether it's pagination or performance improvements. I really can't use the site as it is.

Especially when in the managing your own gallery section (like in the drafts at the moment after import, so much to scroll through to start correcting text from the beginning).

Just throwing in my personal opinion,

I like the endless scrolling, but would love it if hitting back goes to where you left off. Currently trying to remember to open things in new tabs :(

Also, upvoting this though because even though I haven't had issues with endless scrolling, I think this should be added.

Oh, oops, I didn't catch that this was already a highly-upvoted suggestion. The string didn't show up in the search before posting this, I swear! x3

I suppose this just serves as more reasoning for it, then.

This is something I'd like to see as well. Even while on pc it still takes me back to the top of the feed and I have to scroll all the way down to get back to where I was. Implementing this would be a big help.

Lack of paged browsing is simply a deal breaker for me. You can't forget that some of us still use real computers and want to see more than just the last 10 things in our feeds.

Would be great if we could also clear out posts we've already seen to sort what's new and what's not. I was advised on twitter to refresh the page to remove posts I'd already seen, but that doesn't seem to work. =/ I remember the dash used to have everything together instead of in tabs - and while obnoxious, it at least allowed us to remove posts we'd seen and it made sure we could see status updates from people we follow. There doesn't seen to be an option to sort through them anymore and remove seen posts - I'd like that feature back.

I'm fairly new around here, but I have to say that the current methods used are out right obnoxious: I look through the Artwork section for a while, I find some interesting-looking thumbnail, I go there to check it out, I admire it for a while, then go back to see some more. But wait, it just returned me back to the top! So I need to scroll all the way to where I was (if I remember, that is) and then some, all the while getting stuck at the bottom and having to wait for the images I have already seen to load first.

If that's the only experience we can expect from the "infinite scroll" method, then it should probably go, because this isn't your typical social media: the content in those thumbnails is "incomplete", so we need to click on them to see the whole thing, and most importantly: we also need to return back to where we were when we're done!

After using the current system for a while. A page system certainly makes things a bit easier to navigate. It isn't a bad design, but in its current state it does some weird things like randomly jerking images around. Often times changing what image is where in the line up of images.

Additionally would the page system be for your feed as well? I get it has the grid mode already, but page design with having the Fav and promote buttons would be nice too. Or just a way to enter your feed and be able to hot key through the feed its self.

The endless scroll, cropped thumbnails, high browser load (it froze a tab chrome on my first visit with a dual Xeon PC with more ram than doge) and most of the UI design are all blockers at this time. I wrote off FN as yet-another-attempted-FA-replacement till I saw that is a Varka project; will be interesting to see where this goes.

Well, you can combine pagination with ajax loading and refreshing the url (/blah/#page-2) so you have your performance and usibility is *so much* better! Endless scrolling makes everything worse:

- Browser Performance

- You cannot link others the results you are seeing

- Browser history totally broken

AJAX loading requires that you use the History API or it won't work properly either. And having used the History API, I have first hand experience that different browsers treat it differently: some treat the newly added item as the place you go when you hit "back" others treat it as the page you are currently on...

Aren't there two method for this - one which replaces and one which appends? All modern browsers should respect that.

Oh I mean just the append. History.addItem()

IIRC, Firefox and IE all treat that new item as the page you just left whereas Safari and Chrome (the two WebKit browsers) treat it as the page you just got to. Now, that's not the part that screws things up.

It's that when you hit the Back button and pop an item off the stack in the former case (Firefox) you'll get the item you just added and you'll handle the data inside it and end up right where you expect. but in Chrome you'll end up two steps back.

(Mind, this is based off of having played with the history API 2 years ago: I only remember there being some funny business and that Firefox did exactly what I expected. I vaguely recall a scenario where I had to hit Back twice in order to actually go back once, but I don't recall if that was the initial behavior, or the behavior after I tried to account for Chrome's weirdness).

The HTML5 spec doesn't have .addItem() for the history interface as far as I can tell, so I can only presume that's up to browser implementation what it does if anything. The spec states you use .pushState() to give it something new (or .replaceState() if you don't want back button to get to the previous one) and that the .state property has the currently seen one as modified by the browser itself. I'm only hobby web developer myself, so don't take my word as claim of absolute truth.

For reference: https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/browsers.html#the-history-interface

Oh I'm sorry, it's called pushState.

I figured anyone with a reasonable level of flexible reasoning capacity could have figured out what I meant based on the words I used. Excuse me for using "foo" when it's really called "foobar." The history is a stack. I'm sorry for using the generic collection method add when it should really be called push.

Yeah at this point, due to the fact that artwork is also imported in reverse order, I'm kinda dead in the water. I'm trying to make my art public in proper order (as I have comics). I now have 3,400 drafts and the sheer size of the management page now locks up the browser, meaning I can do absolutely nothing. The thumbnails + infinite scrolling are killing me.

Please disable it.

BY DEFAULT.

It's a pain in the butt to navigate this way, and one of my major complaints about this site.

For me, the sie is useless without being able to go back.

What's worse is that even the "infinite" scroll is implemented lazily - with flaws (no saving of scroll position, no prefetch) and even with bugs (I often see black boxes if I scroll up which don't disappear). It's unusable.

As well as all the valid reasons against infinite scrolling others have listed above, it's also been proven to harm sales. My husband is in business intelligence and knows that when Etsy tried it out, their users were sent to either an IS version of the site or the classic paged version. In the IS one, sales were considerably less and as an artist who sells on sites like this I want to make it as easy as possible for people to buy my stuff!

Web dev fads! Yay! Totally useful for end users! Glad someone actually bothered to gather metrics on how it worked for end users instead of forcing it upon them.

Do anyone here browse Thingiverse.com? They have a very nice, endless scrolling page. How they did this - dunno, it's a rocket science for me. But looks good and works fairly smoth even on older PC.
And, it adds page number to adress bar, so after refresh it'll stay in the same place (or close enough).

I hadn't before, but taking a look at it, it's a combination of a couple things:
1) it unloads content that is no longer visible (about 5 "pages" outside your view)

2) those unloaded sections also don't take browser height, which means that it adjusts your scroll position

3) it appears to do both of these things when it loads new content in to continuously scroll, so the jump is actually less noticable

4) it can do this because the content is of known height. Unloading 12 items that come in rows of 3, that's 4 rows, each row is N pixels high...

5) lastly, it changes the url which causes the history to update, but it also does this by removing any prior page (so your history isn't a giant chain of "page:1" "page:2" "page:3" links)

6) it then uses AJAX to load in content when navigation changes to place the browser at the correct position with the desired content visible (per 1, 2, and 4)

I do hope this gets added, as the autoscroll does stop working completly after like 25 images

Definitely need this big time. I have over 3,500 submissions in drafts right now (got nearly 1,000 published but it's taking forever to do because I have to scroll for a long time). Further making things worse is that the editing UI actually displaces the gallery list so you can't select multiple images easily to change the folder they're in. I really want to get everything published in order so that I can start posting new content like I do elsewhere!

We made some performance improvements to search results pages which should help alleviate some of the issues here. More details here:

https://blog.furrynetwork.com/2016/06/07/site-update-june-6-2016/

Ok, so the infinite scroller now refills removed images properly, due to back-end improvements.

However it still:

• Does not track in the History API (if I navigate away I cannot return to where I was in the scroller)
• Still eats a good chunk of my RAM (it does drop as it unloads images, but still takes ~250 MB just to exist; prior to unload, that number can go as high as 800 MB total, which is quite a lot seeing as my Firefox generally sits at 600-800 MB for the tabs I use all the time and crashes it I exceed ~1.5 GB).
• Still does not have pagination (no ability to jump to a specific point, crucial for large galleries like Seth T's)
• Still takes up browser height leading to teeny tiny scroll bar thumbs

Infinite scroll is memory-intensive by design. Browsers don't provide API for manually controlling every bit of memory, what you have is a way to tell the browser, "allocate a chunk of memory and release it when you feel like it", more or less. When you remove an image from a page, it doesn't release image data immediately, it just makes releasing possible. It's the browser that decides when to free RAM and VRAM. It should be noted that pagination isn't a magic solution either as it has the same problems, just to a less degree. At least with pagination you control precisely how many images are displayed.

Chrome is designed to consume all your free memory. :) If you're so low on memory you worry about 200-300 MB per Chrome tab, you shouldn't use it. I think the breaking point for me was 16 GB RAM + 16 GB swap on SSD. This is when I stopped caring about Chrome consuming RAM.

Firefox is better at this. I'm surprised by your 1.5 GB limit - are you sure you check private bytes, not working set, which is usually displayed by default? On my system, Firefox crashes when it reaches ~3 GB, and it takes days browsing and hundreds of open tabs.

I'm a 32 bit peasant, so my limits on RAM are much stricter. ;)

I'm not on 32bit system, but I'd very much like my browsing not to impact other application usability by consuming huge loads of memory. I actually do more than just browse the internet and write on notepad on my computer.

I've got 96GB and I still would prefer if 1.5+ wasn't be used by a single tab. lol

I have a feeling this might end up like "better thumbnails" did on Weasyl, where I'd check once a year if it had finally be implemented byond "soon".

Overall the site is non-intuitive, overly flashy, and painfully annoying to just look around. Maybe in a year or two it might be something I'll find usable.

I don't see Furrynetwork as a viable place to set up until I stagnation pages. As it is, I cannot enjoy any content on this site because my "searches" get reset any time I click off to view an image...This is really frustrating! Please fix this, please. I want to use Furrynetwork and enjoy my time here

I have a feeling this will become like Weasyl's better thumbnails issue.

Didn't know this site existed before today. This made my first impression negative. Not having pages means I can't save my place. Not being able to save my place means I can't browse art. Not being able to browse art means I don't use the site.

Use pages. Use them by default.

We've been discussing this throughout the week, actually. I agree that it can be annoying, and pagination may end up solving some of the bugs that we've had a hard time tackling with the scrolling. This is still on our list, and depending on how things go, it may end up happening sooner rather than later.

We're far in to "later" territory already being that it's years since it was last official discussed on here in any fashion. lol

Removing infinite scrolling and replacing with pagination is effectively "fixed it." :)