[Uristqwerty]

Imagine an email program that, knowing how many total items there are in the inbox, gives you finite scroll! Even if it only streams metadata for nearby items, so if you suddenly drag the bar it has to wait for a network round-trip to show content, one of the problems with infinite scroll is that the scrollbar no longer shows a reliable absolute position.

A better case for infinite scrolling would be chat history, where you'd want an entirely separate UI widget for "jump to date", with bidirectional infinite scroll that unloads distant content, and a way to grab permalinks. Missing any one of those features, or the fact that messages will never be re-ordered for marketing purposes, infinite scrolling becomes a hinderance.