1639746 - Endless scrolling/infinite scrolling is incompatible with user font preferences

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[MarjaE]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:76.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/76.0

Steps to reproduce:

Increasingly many sites use endless scrolling/infinite scrolling.

Many users need to switch fonts and/or font sizes. I've tested this with my userContent.css, and with larger sizes using about:preferences. Either way, I've encountered the same issues.

Font sizes can definitely trigger these bugs. Other font switches, when the new fonts are larger, can probably also trigger these too.

Full-page zoom isn't an adequate solution because it doesn't switch fonts, and it enlarges larger text as much as the smaller text, rather than enlarging everything to a readable size.

Actual results:

On some sites, such as the internet archive, searching for texts, using list view, https://archive.org/details/texts the site initially loads some results. If I scroll far enough down, it starts "loading more results," and then jumps down, so it again starts "loading more results," ... This also makes it hard to find where you were in the list.

On other sites, such as new.reddit.com, the site loads some results, unloads others, and resizes each result after loading. This can cause judder as it resizes each result.

Expected results:

A global setting to kill endless scrolling/infinite scrolling, or at least require a user click to open each new set of results.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 2

[MarjaE]

Attachment: Screen Recording 2022-01-01 at 1.25.54 AM.mov

I've switched fonts and colors for readability. This shows how the combo of user font settings and endless/infinite scrolling can trigger endless endless scrolling on the Internet archive, with the site jumping, and causing itself to load more, and jumping again, and causing itself to load more...