Footer content becomes unreachable
Aliases: footer never comes · infinite scroll blocks footer
What it is
The bottom of a document usually still holds copyright, legal links, language switching, and spare navigation. An unreachable footer under infinite scroll means the list keeps growing another stub at the bottom, so the viewport never arrives at that footer — not that people cannot find where the links are written. Location and ending can be partly patched with other scales. The footer is a concrete target pinned to the document’s end; once append never stops, that target has no arrival event.
Why it happens
Footer reachability depends on “the document has an end”: the scrollbar hits the stop, the footer enters the viewport. Automatic append rewrites “hit the stop” as “go fetch another batch”. The scrollbar thumb shortens again after each load, and people think they are not at the end — correctly. Even if the footer sits in the DOM after the list, the next batch that has not yet arrived keeps standing between them. Legal and technical entries parked in the footer (privacy, an accessibility statement, a spare sign-out) then leave the reachable set: not hidden in a menu, blocked by an endless in-between state.
Some implementations flash the footer in the gap between loads and shove it off when the next batch arrives. The flash is worse than absence: people see it, reach for it, and the target has moved. Others turn the footer into a floating bar, which is no longer a document footer and then fights the tab bar and back-to-top.
Where it stops holding
A chrome-only shell with no footer (legal entries already in system settings) is unaffected. If footer content is copied into About, Settings, or the sign-up flow, the scrolling list may omit a footer — provided those copies are actually reachable, not merely theoretical. Chat bottoms are composer fields, not footers; the mechanism does not apply. If append stops after genuine exhaustion, the footer appears after the last load; unreachability happens when “there is always another batch”, or when the next batch is so slow that people never wait it out.
Applying it
- Do not keep legal, language, and spare account entries only at a document end that append will block; give them a path that does not depend on scrolling to the stop.
- If the list must append infinitely, take the footer out of the list’s document flow into a region the next batch cannot shove, or insert it only when append has stopped.
- Do not flash the footer into the viewport between loads and immediately push it away.
- How to check: with shortcuts and a sitemap disabled, try to tap privacy, language, and spare footer navigation using only scroll. Unreachable is a fail. Then, on a slow network, watch whether the footer flashes and vanishes — a flash also counts as unreachable.