Infinite scroll has been called autopagerize, unpaginate, endless pages

http://www.infinite-scroll.com/

Infinite scroll has been called autopagerize, unpaginate, endless pages. But essentially it is pre-fetching content from a subsequent page and adding it directly to the user’s current page.

Problem Summary:

User is browsing paged content.

Use When:

• Retaining the user is important and clicking “Next Page” is a usability barrier.
• The full content available is too large to show on initial load.
• The content is available in paged chunks: search results, blog posts, product listings portfolio features.

Advantages:

• Users are retained on the site far better.
  • Users are less likely to continue on to the next “page” if they have to click something versus it being delivered automatically to them. ^{[citation needed]}
• Requires no adjustment in a user’s typical reading habits.
• The added functionality needs no affordances or instruction.
• As long as the functionality is enhancing an existing navigational structure (like the wordpress plugin here), it remains SEO-friendly and Accessible. It will degrade gracefully if a user does not have JavaScript enabled..

Disadvantages:

• The “footer” of the page will be typically impossible to reach.
• Currently there is no way to cancel or opt-out of the behavior.
• There is no permalink to a given state of the page.
• Dynamically adding more content to the page increases the memory footprint of the browser. Depending on the browser, this could account for around 50megs of RAM.
• Analytics will not immediately capture the event, so custom configuration is required.

http://www.infinite-scroll.com/