I’d like to see the browser APIs prohibit this - and also disable interference with text selecting and copy/paste buffer. There is no legit reason for this functionality.
I think it would be very difficult to make something like Google docs or the rich text compose options in a new email without the ability to trigger actions on text selection and clipboard.
What I would like to see is a permission though, like when browsers ask for your location: "This site want's to manipulate your clipboard. Allow?"
If we could go back in time and redesign everything from a clean slate, we really should just have different formats and client apps for “run portable apps with rich GUIs over the Internet” and “view text with clickable links embedded.”
How could you change browser APIs to block infinite scrolling? It boils down to making a network request and adding html elements. You can't disable those since they're using significantly outside of infinite scrolling.
The best way to block it would be to provide direct support for it. Rather than each site rewrite the user experience with Javascript, the browser could support a standard paginated HTML. Then it could render that as infinite scroll, or pagination, at the user's preference.
Now that the Javascript genie is out of the bottle, you can't stop single-page apps from doing their own navigation. But if you make it simple enough for developers, many new sites will choose to support a standard HTML feature rather than continue to manage it themselves.
That would, of course, take time and be the usual HTML-evolution clusterf*. But if Google or Mozilla decided to start it, in conjunction with one or a few major blog/social-media providers, it could probably be widely supported within a decade.
