Start and application navigation

Described herein are techniques to facilitate efficient application navigation by a user. In one embodiment, two or more scrollable surfaces contain application icons. One surface may have a first type of application icon and may be a user-customized surface akin to a desktop. Usually, only one of the surfaces is active and displayed at a given time. The user can swap one surface into view and the other surface out of view. The active surface is independently scrollable; when a given surface is swapped out and then swapped back in, despite any scrolling of the intervening surface, when the given surface is swapped back into view it returns at the same position it had before being swapped out. Another embodiment may provide optimizations to enhance performance and responsiveness by pre-rendering imagery of an off-screen surface. Caching logic may be used to assure that the imagery is correct.