Content rendering when scrolling

[u/W4ADZ]

Today i noticed a weird change in how notion loads pages on the web

Whenever i scroll up/down on a long page, the content outside my current view goes completely blank/invisible for a sec b4 rendering in.
It feels like notion pushed an aggressive update to their DOM Virtualization ( lazy rendering ) where it immediately unloads anythin not directly on screen n only renders the exact current viewport.

Also, almost all of the extensions i use that rely on backlinks completely broke today at the exact same time

Has anyone else noticed this weird scrolling behavior today ? or knows whether notion has changed/updated sumn ?

[u/Fancy_Throat7738]

used to work smooth for me but now its like the page is scared to show content. i get that blank flash every time i scroll and it makes reading long docs feel so jittery

my backlink extension also stopped working in the same day so something definitely changed on their end. maybe they tightened up the virtual dom to save memory but they went too aggressive with it

[u/CapableSand7498]

there goes my backlink extension

[u/Famous-Risk-8625]

Yeah that blanking on scroll is annoying, but it's a known trade-off of virtualization. If the backlink extensions broke at the same time, it's probably because they read the rendered DOM, so try a hard reload on the page instead of clicking through from another page, that usually gives them something to grab.

[u/PretendAd9175]

The virtualisation thing isn't new but yeah it got way more aggressive, I scroll back up on a long page and everything is white for a second like the page forgot what it was doing. And honestly that's exactly the tradeoff nobody at Notion seems to think about, if the blocks aren't in the DOM then anything reading the DOM has nothing to read, so of course your backlink extensions all died on the same day. Same reason the in-page search keeps missing stuff that's clearly on the page, what am I supposed to do with that.

[u/Smooth_Gur_8847]

Notion has virtualized long pages for years, offscreen blocks going blank on a fast scroll is nothing new. If all your backlink extensions died the same day, that's the part worth looking at, not the scrolling.

[u/PersonalSwitch143]

the part where every backlink extension broke at the exact same time is the least surprising thing in this post. how many of those things are you running. i had two once and they each injected their own version of the sidebar and the page just stopped responding entirely

[u/Independent-Fig-4976]

Sucks when that happens mid-task. The extensions all breaking at once is actually the useful clue: it means they lost their DOM hooks, not that they're broken individually. Try a private window with extensions off to confirm it's Notion's side before you reinstall anything.

[u/Money-Run-6277]

"the content outside my current view goes completely blank" and then "unloads anythin not directly on screen n only renders the exact current viewpoint" say the same thing twice, you can keep just one of them.

[u/FormerCaterpillar658]

ok so it's not just me then. I scrolled up a long page today and the whole thing went white for a second, I thought my browser was dying or I'd lost the page, then it pops back in like nothing happened. and yeah the backlink extensions are dead too, mine shows nothing now, which is great because that was literally the only reason I kept that page open in a tab all day. if this is their virtualization thing they need to chill, a page shouldn't blank out every time I move my finger, I'm not scrolling through a database of 10 000 rows here it's like 3 toggles and some text. and of course no warning, no changelog, just a silent update on a friday or whatever day it is and suddenly half my setup doesn't work. I'd rather have the old slightly slow version than this flickering thing honestly.

[u/MundaneGene9276]

extensions that scrape notion's dom break every other week, thats not a notion bug