Misscrolling

Tim Bray, on the problem with paging down to the bottom of a web page. I’ve been bothered by this same thing since forever. (Maybe on Safari the solution would be to bounce the web page, showing the linen texture “under” the page — the same thing you see when you scroll past the end of the page using trackpad gestures.)

Update: DF reader Frank Kohlhepp put together a Safari extension that simply adds a screenful of whitespace to the bottom of every page. Not bad for a quick hack, and indeed it solves the problem Bray describes. But there’s a cost: with this extension, the scrollbar thumb is no longer an accurate indicator of content length, particularly with short web pages. Maybe that doesn’t matter, though? Scrollbars aren’t even persistently visible on Lion if you’re using a trackpad. I’m going to try using this.

★ Friday, 2 December 2011