This endless live scrolling..

[ceagle]

You know, the endless live-scrolling code that Twitter and Tumblr and a few other places are using now.... does anyone really like it much?

With every new increment, interaction with the page gets slower, and slowwwwwwer, and slowwwwwwwwwwwwer.... so this never-ending continuously loading more-and-more on the Same Page... seems like it's clunky and bothersome to me... I'd rather go to a "next page" in succession, like most pages/blogs are .... at least then you know there's a limit to the LOAD LAG ;P

Comments

[orv.livejournal.com]

Browser memory.

This is actually a Javascript hack that people have nicknamed "Comet." It works essentially by never finishing the page load -- the server keeps the connection open, and periodically pushes out a new Javascript code fragment that inserts a new <div> into the page with the new content, which the browser executes on the fly due to incremental rendering. The problem is this causes the page to grow forever; the browser never stops rendering it and each <div> tag adds to the size of the page.

The reason for this hack is HTTP has no built-in way to push data on demand from a server to a client; it can only pull data.

[tyrrlin.livejournal.com]

And this is why I try to stick with the few text-based pages out there, like LJ. I don't have Twitter or Tumblr, and rarely, rarely use FB.

[torakiyoshi.livejournal.com]

Facebook tried it. I got a codemonkey script to stop it the same day.

[atkelar.livejournal.com]

Despite the fact that I pretty much hate the JavaScript overload that is going on these days... I rarely have any problem with these scrollers, if they are done right...
The ones I know use a JavaScript to load another block of whatever it is you are viewing using AJAX. I'm using IE9 and ever since I first saw these things pop up (IE7) I couldn't say that I had any decline in browsing speed whatsoever. Again, the better ones will show a "loading" message...