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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

>2. No flipping way to quickly navigate to the top or bottom of the post.

I don't know what the state of this is on Android, but iOS 13 lets you grab the scrollbar and go immediately to wherever you want in a document.

The scrollbar doesn't show up by default, so it's a 2-step operation. Scroll a bit to make the scroll indicator appear, then grab it and scroll faster.

Works well but I doubt many people are aware of it yet. People just assume you can't grab the scroll indicator in iOS since Apple took that feature away when they first launched the iPhone. Scroll bar has been non-interactable for the last 12 years of their touch devices.

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On iOS, you can tap the top of the address bar to scroll to the top (I think since iOS 3.0 or so). This became 2 taps when they started hiding the address bar (one to show it, and another to invoke the "back to top" feature).

In Chrome (and probably other browsers), you can use CMD+Up to jump to the top and CMD+Down to jump to the bottom.

>I don't know what the state of this is on Android, but iOS 13 lets you grab the scrollbar and go immediately to wherever you want in a document.

It's inconsistent on android, it works like that with most things but strangely not with some apps. You can't grab the scrollbar in Retroarch for example, even though you can see it. It makes scrolling through huge lists of ROMs extremely aggravating.

> It's inconsistent on android

Inconsistency in Android is one of its selling features if you are in to that.

I don't mind it most of the time. I wouldn't mind if scrollbars would let you utilize them consistently though or at least work like a scroll bar should all the time. To be fair though, I've used plenty of desktop software with inconsistent scrollbar behaviour to so...

> It’s inconsistent in Android

The only thing consistent about Android is its inconsistency, but even that can vary.

On a more serious note, I can’t find the date this was originally published (??? Seriously?!) so I don’t know what OS and browser versions were prevalent at the time of writing.

Top right corner over by the user info - 3 years ago.

I double checked by going to their other posts - it is the post-age, not the user-age, despite the "follow this user" button right next to it.

I did not know this. Another way to quickly get to the top of tables in iOS, assuming you're in an app, is to double tap the button of whatever page you're in in the navigation bar at the bottom. Some apps somehow disable this but it's the default behavior built into the OS.

You can pretty universally scroll to the top of anything on iOS by tapping the title bar along the top!

Works in Safari as well, though if the toolbar is collapsed your first tap will be to expand that, then the second one scrolls up.

Tapping the button of the tab you're on doesn't always scroll to the top; it does always scroll to the default position. In the "All Photos" tab of the Photos app, which is sorted with newest photos at the bottom, tapping the tab again will bring you down to the bottom, as that's the default position.

This is a special case; the default behavior is to scroll to the top.

Exactly right.

> Lord knows, you can't actually grab the scrollbar and navigate with the bloody thing.

I read those words while actually grabbing the scrollbar and navigating with the bloody thing.

On various apps, with Google Chrome/Android being the worst, it can take minutes to scroll through pages / tabs.

I tend to have a lot of browser tabs open (well over 1,000 on desktop Firefox, which actually is fairly managable), and on Android there's simply no way to deal with more than ~20 (which I can easily hit in a minute or so).

Firefox/Android is far better in this regard, but on my device is so slow (literally minutes for UI responses) as to be unusable. Yes, despite numerous touted "performance" improvements. I'd very much like to switch. I simply cannot.

On Pocket, which is mentioned in the article and with a longer linked Reddit post ("It gets worse the more you use it"), it takes several minutes to scroll through my Tags list, with absolutely no search or keyboard accelleration possible. This on a tablet with an attached Bluetooth keyboard.

Tablet/mobile usability is complete crap, which is disappointing as tablet form-factor is otherwise promising. (Subject of yet another rant, this also on Ello.)

OP, FWIW.

> well over 1,000 on desktop Firefox, which actually is fairly managable How? :O What's your workflow?

Probably Tree Tabs, a vertical treed list of tabs on the side of the window.

Tree-style Tabs.

I tend to keep various projects/tasks organised by windows, and am increasingly using Incognito sessions not to hide anything in particular, but simply to keep myself from accruing yet more history.

I'm pursuing a wide-ranging set of research across numerous topics, and there's a large amount of material which seems at least potentially relevant. Cutting through what I've found and categorising it is a major part of what I'm trying to do, though how well I succeed is ... debatable.

There are also programming and sysadmin tasks, and other projects that I dive into. Those typically get some sort of state, whether it's a tab tree within a window, or a separate window.

Tabs are horrible. But they're better than all the other state-management methods which have come along from time to time.

On Android, the problem is that past a small handful of tabs, management, place-keeping, and showing relationships between tabs (parent/child, generally) becomes impossible. I've been trying to close out the open tabs I've got for ... a couple of years now. Sites have come and gone in that time.

Scroll performance in these scenarios is perfectly fine on an iPhone. I also tend to have hundreds of tabs up in Safari, not that I condone working that way...it's a sickness. Alas I've recently learned Safari's limit is 500. It's cumbersome but you can zip through them quite fast.

You seem to be describing a deficiency with your platform or your hardware, not with "mobile."

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