Very old sessions are hard to scroll to

[FH]

Lazy loading of "collections" is great for opening the session buddy tab faster but it makes it extremely tedious to scroll down to very old sessions. My list is several years long and it's taking me forever to go back even just a few months, let alone to the oldest sessions. Please provide a "load all" button so the scrollbar can instantly be dragged to the bottom of the list. It might take a few seconds to load but it would be on demand for these particular occasions when accessing very old sessions is required.

[Егор Ткаченко]

Same issue. it took for me 5  or so minutes to do what was done on v3 (better) version with just a second.

[FH]

I gave up after scrolling back 6 months. Browsing through sessions older than that is now practically impossible. It's hard to believe this was tested and deemed acceptable. Yet another significant downgrade in what used to be a useful extension. Shame.

[J.T. Brown III]

+1 👍 for the 'Load All' button suggestion above.

[FH]

Any hope this will be addressed? The session list is useless beyond a few dozen entries.

[Session Buddy Support]

This is unlikely to be changed. Lazy loading is a pretty standard (and necessary) web app paradigm. Do you have the same problem with Gmail, for example?

Would collection sorting (created/updated, asc/desc) minimize the burden associated with browsing very old collections for you?

Hans

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[FH]

I'm not asking for lazy loading to be disabled, just to provide a button to load all the sessions. So standard behavior would still be lazy loading, but on those occasions when one needs to scroll back several months or years, clicking on "load all" would allow for the scrollbar to access old items much faster. As it stands, it is nearly impossible to navigate more than a few months back because lazy loading make scrolling excruciatingly slow.

Collection sorting wouldn't help for simply browsing through arbitrarily old sessions. Besides, isn't it very simple to just add a "load all" button?

(I don't have that problem in Gmail because it has pagination.)

[FH]

Out of curiosity, have you tested navigating through thousands of past sessions using the scrollbar? I have 7 years' worth of past sessions, with on average 5 sessions saved per day, so roughly 12k saved sessions. Scrolling to any point in this history in v3 was almost instantaneous, however far back I needed to go, whether that was at the top, bottom or anywhere in the middle of the list. Try it with this version and tell me how long it takes you to get to a session somewhere in the middle of a list of 12k sessions. It's practically impossible. What is the point of saving all this history if we can't access it in a reasonable time? The usability drops to zero past a few hundred saved sessions, and even that is stretching it. As I've noted in another post, the problem is further compounded by the fact that the position in the list is not maintained when searching for a string then clearing the search string, so navigating around a search result is impossible.

[FH]

One more point to note. On my potato of a computer, v3 loads all 12k sessions in about 3 seconds, so a "load all" button in v4 is certainly not an unreasonable feature to add to provide instantaneous scrolling through saved sessions.

[Session Buddy Support]

>  I don't have that problem in Gmail because it has pagination

I might be missing something, but how does pagination not present the same problem for browsing very old emails?

Hans

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[JP]

For now I am still running an instance of the previous version so that I can carry out some conversion and maintenance tasks on previous backups I have of old DBs, and to establish a basis for comparison between the two versions so that I can be as rigorous as possible when I make any suggestions regarding the new version of session buddy.

Having said that, I too experience a similar experience. With tens of thousands of saved sessions is much faster and convenient to browse the sessions list, lacking the lazy load feature. I tested it in a 14 year old PC and it performs well.

I know that codebases are different but at least by adding this feature it will cover all the needs of different users, the ones with machines that can handle the load and those who can't (who will not be able to use it suitably).  

So, +1 vote to add a "load all" feature. 

My best regards.

[FH]

> I might be missing something, but how does pagination not present the same problem for browsing very old emails?

Gmail is not the best example but when pagination is properly implemented, a user can select an arbitrary page to navigate to by directly specifying the desired page number.

Anyways, we are talking about Session Buddy. Do you not recognize the problem lazy loading of a scrolling list presents when trying to navigate a very long list? Have you tried testing with several thousands of saved sessions as I suggested? How long does it take you to scroll down to the middle of such a list? And when you eventually reach the point you're looking for and close the Session Buddy tab, you would have to repeat this tedious scrolling exercise all over again. Do you not agree that for these common use cases, providing a simple "Load all" button would perfectly solve this problem? I'm struggling to understand your objection to such a convenient feature. Without it, the list of saved sessions is unusable beyond a few dozen past sessions.

Again, I am not asking you to disable lazy loading. It would still be the default behavior. Simply add a "Load all" button somewhere so that one may, with one click, obtain the full list of saved sessions to freely and rapidly scroll through without further incremental loading. Alternatively, allow us to configure the lazy loading increment size with "full" or "all" as an option for the size setting (although I would prefer a "Load all" button). The initial loaded set upon opening the Session Buddy tab could remain small and the configured increment size would take effect as the scrollbar is dragged down.

As I mentioned previously, on my very modest 10 year old computer, loading 12k+ sessions takes 3 seconds. On today's average computer, I imagine it wouldn't take more than a second, perhaps much less. There really is no need to limit us to scrolling in achingly tiny increments with the computing resources commonly available today.

On Tuesday, April 16, 2024 at 12:38:47 AM UTC-4 Session Buddy Support wrote:

>  I don't have that problem in Gmail because it has pagination

I might be missing something, but how does pagination not present the same problem for browsing very old emails?

Hans

[Session Buddy Support]

How about an experimental flag that allows you to set the page size? Then you could just set it to some high number to load all collections (at the cost of slower page loads).

> Do you not recognize the problem lazy loading of a scrolling list presents when trying to navigate a very long list?

Lazy loading (and pagination) solve a specific problem. Of course it has tradeoffs. The idea is to maximize value across general usage. Scrolling through hundreds of "very old" collections is probably not, as you posit, a common use case. Consider also that collections will load over the network for cloud users.

The Gmail example is relevant because...

1) Its pagination implementation does actually present the same problem for you for browsing very old emails, yet you claim it's not a pain point. What's unique about the way you use SB that make it a pain point there but not for Gmail? Is it because you don't frequently browse old emails, or is there some way you've worked around the limitations?

2) Why do you suppose Gmail (an app with a slightly larger user base and budget than SB) does not have a "Load all" button?

Hans

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[FH]

> How about an experimental flag that allows you to set the page size? Then you could just set it to some high number to load all collections (at the cost of slower page loads).

That was my alternative suggestion (configurable increment size setting), as long as an option to set it to "all" is provided (instead of having to guess an arbitrarily large number). Why make it experimental though? And again I must ask, why are you so firmly opposed to providing a simple "Load all" button? As for slower page loads, please refer to my previous comment regarding this. On today's average computer, loading 12k+ sessions is nearly instantaneous, so this is a non issue.

> Lazy loading (and pagination) solve a specific problem. Of course it has tradeoffs. The idea is to maximize value across general usage. > Scrolling through hundreds of "very old" collections is probably not, as you posit, a common use case. Consider also that collections will load over the network for cloud users.

Again, I am not asking you to disable lazy loading. Surely you understand this. A "Load all" button wouldn't impact cloud users since the default behavior would still be lazy loading. The entire list would be loaded only on demand when this button is clicked.

As for the use case we're discussing, what makes you think it's uncommon? Are you suggesting that the list of saved sessions is useless? Indeed, why display it at all if scrolling through it is practically impossible? Why present users with data they can't reasonably access? There are already others in this thread who would like a "Load all" button (not to mention possibly hundreds more in the various Reddit threads about this update). I'm really puzzled that you fail to see its value. 

> The Gmail example is relevant because...

It is irrelevant because, as I stated, it is poorly implemented. Why would you choose to base your design on a flawed example?

> 1) Its pagination implementation does actually present the same problem for you for browsing very old emails, yet you claim it's not a pain point. What's unique about the way you use SB that make it a pain point there but not for Gmail? Is it because you don't frequently browse old emails, or is there some way you've worked around the limitations?

I did not claim it's not a pain point, I said it is poorly implemented. A proper implementation would allow a user to input the desired page number such that navigation to an arbitrary page can be done with one click.

> 2) Why do you suppose Gmail (an app with a slightly larger user base and budget than SB) does not have a "Load all" button?

Different use cases require different solutions. For Gmail, the solution would be a "page number" field such as I described above. Also, surely you realize Google is not always the best example to follow. Just look at how disastrous Youtube's comment section is.

[FH]

> The idea is to maximize value across general usage.

How does making data impossible to access maximize value? Considering the list of sessions is practically impossible to scroll through in its entirety, its value has been effectively reduced to zero.

[Session Buddy Support]

Because everyone is loading the app, and very few people are browsing very old data. These are well-established trade-offs behind the idea of lazy loading, which has become a common pattern in web apps. Your criticisms apply to lazy loading, not Session Buddy per se, although you’re overselling (and consequently diluting) your point a bit by saying that lazy loading makes it impossible to access old data and effectively reduces the value of a list to zero. 

I’m curious by the way, what is your need for frequently accessing very old sessions? This is ultimately the question that needs to be answered to move the needle.

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[Session Buddy Support]

The point isn’t so much that Gmail is the best example to follow. It was meant to be a relatable example. Perhaps I should instead have asked: do you have examples of lazy loading implemented in popular apps with a Load All button? Genuinely curious as that would certainly add some intriguing context to this discussion. 

> I did not claim it's not a pain point

Then I’m unsure what you meant by “It’s not a problem for me because Gmail has pagination”.

Is lazy loading intolerable for you in all other apps that make use of it as well? Or is there something unique about the way you use Session Buddy that makes it particularly painful? 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sessionbuddy-discuss/b09b10e8-a939-44ee-8f44-3e9ff4c494fdn%40googlegroups.com.