infinite scroll - how do twitter facebook "hide" extra data

Question

I've been reading and trying to implement various forms of infinite scroll, whether it be in jquery, django, or some combo of both. I'm using the firebug extension in chrome to track the calls made when I scroll to the bottom of the page and request more data from my database. Whenever I hit the bottom of the page, firebug shows an additional request to grab more data.

Using firebug on twitter.com and facebook.com, I noticed that no additional requests show up in firebug when I use their infinite scrolls and scroll to the bottom of the page, even though more data is loaded. I imagine this is much better from a security standpoint. How do they do "hide" those additional requests?

I am not sure you are right, I can see requests being made on twitter when scrolled to the end — Hazem Salama, Sep 02 '12 at 19:26
It does show up in firebug for firefox but doesn't show up in the firebug extension for chrome (which is actually "firebug lite". Thx — , Sep 02 '12 at 19:49

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:20

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They don't hide it. They do fetch the extra data on an on-demand basis

Possible approaches you could look into are :-

Tracking the scroll event to see if user has reached the end of scroll.
Track when the footer(or similar div at the bottom) comes into view.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:20

Community

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answered Sep 02 '12 at 19:31

Robin Maben

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@kristen: I agree. But answering your question with just a yes/no does not make my answer helpful for future visitors reading the answers here. Which is why I added some useful pointers with links. – Robin Maben Sep 02 '12 at 19:53

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 02 '12 at 19:33

It makes sense to split the results in different requests in these cases, because you will render faster, since you do not preload all the results but only a part of them.

In your case, if the amount of data is not that much but you just want to handle they way you present them, you can split your results in blocks of a fixed number. You can add an extra block of results till they run out every time you scroll down.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 02 '12 at 20:07

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The extra content isn't hidden - in Facebook, when you approach the end of the page an ajax call is made to get the new content.

Looking at the resources in Chrome a call is made to this file to load the extra contents -

https://www.facebook.com/ajax/pagelet/generic.php/MoreStoriesPagelet

edited Sep 02 '12 at 20:07

Robin Maben

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answered Sep 02 '12 at 19:32

DaveR

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infinite scroll - how do twitter facebook "hide" extra data

3 Answers3