1331248 - Please introduce feature to disable or break infinite scrolling

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Oliver Kluge]

Infinite scrolling is a pain in the ass. It wastes loads of memory, slows down everything and, worst of all, breaks deep linking and bookmarks and causes complete disorientation on large websites.

At first, it became a "feature" of some web services, then it found its way into some content management systems, then into suites like Wordpress. Despite protests by users, some CMS do not even allow the webmaster to switch off this "feature" without tapping into the CSS and/or Javascipt (which many webmasters aren't capable of), which should, or better: must, be an option for the user to decide on.

Therefore I make a twofold proposal for Firefox improvement:

a) Introduce via Mozilla and others participating in international standardization meetings, a uniform method how all browsers can tell web servers "user wants pagination" or "user wants endless scrolling" or "user doesn't care, use site default".
b) A plugin (by default disabled, but user activateable) that actively breaks endless scrolling. Certainly such a feature would hardly be able to universally break ALL endless scroling, but it could try to do so on many sites, where the Javascript for doing so is well-known.

I am sure such a feature would be welcomed by many many FF users being annoyed by the fact that websites force a user interface originally designed for smartphones and websites with little content onto mouse-using PC or laptop users surfing on high-content websites.

Comment 1

[Robert Longson [:longsonr]]

This isn't a bug or anything that we could implement immediately. It's something you should probably bring up on one of the Mozilla forums instead. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/forums/ and/or with w3c on their mailing lists.