How to disable Twitter infinite scroll in the browser
Twitter, like many social media services, has a timeline or feed. This feed loads older content by default the more you scroll down. You basically have a never-ending feed much like Facebook and Reddit. It makes it hard to actually stop browsing Twitter since there’s always something else to read. On the Twitter iOS and Android apps, the feed also reloads when there’s new content making it harder to put your phone away. You can disable the auto-refresh on the Twitter iOS and Android apps. On your desktop browser, you can use an extension/add-on to disable Twitter’s infinite scroll behavior.
Disable Twitter infinite scroll
In order to disable Twitter’s infinite scroll, you need to install an extension/add-on called Twitter Infinite Scroll Disabler which has about as descriptive a name as you can ask for. It’s available for both Chrome, and for Firefox.
Install it and when you reach the end of however many tweets have loaded so far in your timeline, you will see a ‘Show more’ option. Click it, and more tweets will load.
Twitter for web doesn’t automatically load new tweets. You still have to tap the the comma key to load new tweets. Twitter Infinite Scroll Disabler is quite restrictive when it comes to not showing tweets. It doesn’t stop at the tweets that may have already loaded. Instead, it draws the line at the visible tweets. This means that if you scroll further down, any tweets that did not fit inside the browser window will be hidden until you click ‘Show More’. In some cases, it will show more tweets e.g., when the tweets appear to have media attached and tend to take up more space on the screen.
Twitter Infinite Scroll Disabler is newly developed so as yet, it doesn’t have any options to change how many tweets are loaded by default. There’s also no keyboard shortcut support just yet for loading older tweets. It also doesn’t have a toggle option to enable/disable it on the fly which might be useful. Twitter is a social media platform but it’s not always a waste of time. Often it’s a good place to follow a trending topic which is why an on/off toggle can be useful.
Twitter Infinite Scroll Disabler is available for Chrome which means if you’re running the new Edge based on Chromium, you ought to be able to install the extension in it as well. The extension is not available for Safari on macOS.
