I’ve just added a nice unobtrusive scroll to top feature to my blog, and learnt an interesting tip in the process I thought I would share, originating from one of the many problems Twitter has had with it’s jQuery fanciness. The scroll to top stuff isn’t overly complicated - just detect when the user has scrolled x pixels down the screen, and then show a link to go back to the top (Which can be animated if you want) - for a nice tutorial on this, check out_this_tutorial. The thing is that this technique uses the scroll event (bound to window, but can be bound to basically anything with a scrollbar). The scroll event gets fired any time the window is scrolled - but any time the scroll amount changes at all. What this means is that the scroll event is fired any time scroll position changes - so if you grab the scrollbar, and pull, the scroll event is fired every time the bar moves, not when you release the mouse. John_Resig_reports_that_Twitter_ran_into_some_problems_with_this - they had a function bound directly to the scroll event being fired every time anyone scrolled (at all!). Resig has also reported a nice solution though, which I’ll pass on here. It’s actually quite simple. Instead of binding a complicated function to the scroll event, you simply set a flag variable to let something else know that the window has been scrolled. The second piece of the solution is a function running via setInterval - that is, a function being called on a scheduled basis. The first task of this function is to check this flag - if it is set, it can perform any task (Such as showing a ‘Back to Top’ link, and set the flag variable back to false.  The end result of this solution is that you basically have a polling function, rather than an event-driven one. This is actually a good thing though, when it comes to this type of event. Instead of having a complex function called every time the window is scrolled, a function is called every quarter second or so, and only executes if the window has been scrolled - much better! I personally used an object variable, rather than just a flag - this object was populated with the object that was scrolled on, and I then checked if this object was populated in my polling function (rather than just is true), and could then use the context it provided in this function. Since then, however, I have realized that in my case, this object will alwaysbe the window object - so I may as well have a cheaper variable assignment and just directly refer to the object in my polling function.