Hardly any app is designed for subway riders. If they were, we'd have widespread preloading (like half an hour of tweets pre-loaded), seamless delayed posting (sending a new post when the internet comes back online), and visibility into what's downloading and uploading so users can make informed choices. As with all accessibility affordances, this will help people beyond the targeted group - like air travelers, folks living in rural areas, or those out of the country without service. They say wifi coverage in trains is going take another 25 years in the NYC subway system. Until then, I hope we pay more attention to users with intermittent internet access.
I think I kind of hate lazy loading
51–60 of 182 posts
Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading
#52I live in Germany and so do most of my users, so I take the spotty internet rather seriously. There are lots of holes in the coverage even in the capital. Then there is the underground. However loading the images early wastes bandwidth, and it hurts SEO. In my case the user can live without those images, so it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. I hope that descriptive alt tags will help. On the other hand, the whole…
Back in the olden days when I was closer to the web, and we didn't have the browser to do lazy loading for us, we would always load everything 'below the fold' after a timeout, if the user hadn't scrolled down (or left the page). Seems not unreasonable to not load images that aren't visible during the initial load, but pull them in a bit later. There's some priorty things you could try, but priorities don't always work the way we might want.
MDN says img lazy doesn't work unless javascript is enabled, so easy peasy to use javascript to make the images unlazy after onload.
Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading
#53Even if network conditions are great, lazy loading breaks browser operations like "Find" with Ctrl-F. It's only gonna search what's in the viewport. I think lazy loading should only be used when there's an actually infinite stream of content to load. But stuff like the twitter replies section shouldn't be this way. I shouldn't have to scroll all the way down to make sure search works.
I'm not typically a Jira hater (I know, I know) but this is definitely a gripe I have with it. The backlog view lazy loads. Tiny little scraps of text! Ok so there's rank, priority, and maybe a few other data points to query for. But still, come on!
Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're thinking of your own costs; the developer is more likely thinking of their own than yours.
As a web dev… I honestly have never thought of it that way in terms of cost. I would rather a user see the whole page, consume all the content, it’s not a big cost.
Then you’ve probably just not worked on pages of that scale so far.
Some very large sites maintain alternate versions of images in chance the browser supports something more efficient than JPEG; that can save about 30% – at the expense of a lot of complexity and extra server side storage. Yet they still do it: It’s still worth it for them.
But nothing beats not loading the image at all!
As a web user, I personally also don’t particularly like it.
Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading
#55There used to be a time where you can load up a YouTube video on the site and go offline then watch the video. You can't do that any more, unless you actively find a way to download the said video.
Uh, youtube absolutely has a save for offline viewing option.
In the browser and without paying for Premium on mobile?
Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Lazy loading makes it impossible to do anything to manage a poor connection. This was the exact problem lazy loading was supposed to solve
If the problem was out-of-viewport images impeding the receipt of assets that do affect the viewport (CSS, fonts, etc.) then it would be good to postpone fetching those images just until everything else is received, rather than postponing until they're closer to the viewport.
Fun fact, if you type your password, it will show up as ***
Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are they inspecting your network traffic?
They aren't going to see behind the TLS curtain, but they would see (assuming no DNS encryption) a domain name lookup followed by various traffic patterns; either: Bursts (page loads) with near silence in between, maybe just some non-human-triggered traffic from scripts that poll. Bursts (page loads) with quite a bit more of a human-triggered cadence in between, if lazy loading during scrolling occurs. But mouse-trac…
Even with encrypted DNS, the unencrypted host name is usually part of the TLS handshake (or the server wouldn’t know what certificate to present to you).
Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading
#58> There's no way to disable Lazy Loading on Android Chrome or Android Firefox.
I haven’t tested it, but I would expect that Firefox for Android would still support going to about:config and changing… hmm, looks like dom.image-lazy-loading.enabled is no more, so I suppose you can just set dom.image-lazy-loading.root-margin.bottom to an enormous number (probably don’t need to worry about top/left/right, but you can do them for good measure if you want).
Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading
#59Even if network conditions are great, lazy loading breaks browser operations like "Find" with Ctrl-F. It's only gonna search what's in the viewport. I think lazy loading should only be used when there's an actually infinite stream of content to load. But stuff like the twitter replies section shouldn't be this way. I shouldn't have to scroll all the way down to make sure search works.
This article is talking specifically about , not progressively-loaded content, which is quite a different kettle of fish.
(Specifically, everyone agrees progressively loading your content is to be avoided if possible, whereas “add loading=lazy to your images” is common performance advice.)
Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading
#60If you open an article on a train you could always scroll to the bottom of the page before you start reading it in order to load all the resources.
There ought to be a "fringe reception mode" (extension, perhaps) which automates that, ideally without the user noticing. Just as TFA calls for.
To me, that’s one of these “reading mode” apps.
It works ok most of the time, but I really wish there was a standard for that that browsers could just implement, rather than these (often centralized) apps having to reverse engineer it.
The one I use even belongs to a browser vendor, yet they’re trying to constantly upsell me a premium subscription.