Would you much rather it load 500 different web fonts on page load and take 50 years to load?

Pagination.

I found the non-paginated version to be very responsive and quick. Personally, I prefer non paginated results as long as they're quick, and some user testing studies indicate this as well[1]. UX folks seem to prefer not to paginate[2]. Who loves pagination? Usually advertisers.

[1]https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search...

[2]http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/21375/is-there-a-point...

Coding horror had an interesting article awhile back about this https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-end-of-pagination/

Links from half a decade ago are irrelevant here. The claim that pagination only benefits advertisers is ironic, given we are discussing a Google page.

The point of pagination in this case is to reduce the client-side processing load and up-front bandwidth consumption to view the page. This isn't a news article. It's a set of nontrivial binary files being downloaded and rendered using javascript.

The OP of this thread complained that infinite scrolling plus lazy loading put his browser under heavy load. The first respondent accused him of wanting everything loading up front. I merely suggest a middle ground.

My only complaint with infinite scrolling is that it breaks the scroll bar. It looks like Google accounted for that here by pre-rendering placeholders so the scroll bar doesn't keep resizing and jumping around. (But this wouldn't work so well if they had, say, 10,000 fonts.) Waiting for dynamic content to fill in the placeholders is no worse than waiting for a new page to load.

I just wish we had a standard "lever" widget to replace the scroll bar in lazily loaded pages - similar to the middle-click scrolling on at least some systems that have middle mouse buttons.

When I go to a web page, yes, I expect the page to load completely and be done with it.

No scrolling needed. Show 1 page of content, and use AJAX to quickly load new page content.

We've discovered quite a bit while building this site, and better scroll performance is in the works. Stay tuned.