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I think I kind of hate lazy loading

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Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading

#71

Post by hunter2_ »

lxgr wrote: post #57
hunter2_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

True, though there seems to be decent momentum toward ECH (which supplants ESNI) lately:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/handshake-encryption-endgame-an-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/comments/wp6yve/what_are...

Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading

#72

Post by deprecative »

lxgr wrote: post #54
duxup wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

If only we could progressively enhance a page rather than stunt them via lazy loading.

Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading

#73

Post by ed_mercer »

smasher164 wrote: post #49

Even 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.

> lazy loading breaks browser operations like "Find" with Ctrl-F. It's only gonna search what's in the viewport

Sort of. If you quickly add a letter and then remove it while the page is loading it'll refresh the results though (sort of like a React force re-render)

Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading

#74

Post by jiqiren »

This is a solved problem with Safari since at least High Sierra days. You add any webpage to your reading list and with appropriate settings you'll have a full local copy.

https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/keep-a-reading-list-s... relevant quote below...

Save a page in your Reading List to read when you’re not connected to the Internet: Control-click the page summary in the sidebar, then choose Save Offline. You can also swipe left over the page summary, then click Save Offline. To automatically save all pages in your Reading List, choose Safari > Preferences, click Advanced, then select “Save articles for offline reading automatically.”

Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading

#75

Post by chupchap »

afavour wrote: post #69
chupchap wrote: post #68

Why did we go from pre-rendered pages generated with multi-threading on a server to single threaded javascript sequential loading in the front end?

That has nothing to do with the complaint here.

I thought this was the reason behind increasing use of lazy loading, especially in the context of non-live data like images and text

Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading

#76

Post by Izkata »

deprecative wrote: post #72
lxgr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

If only we could progressively enhance a page rather than stunt them via lazy loading.

Image-wise, isn't GIF capable of that? I remember back in the dialup days some image type would be quickly visible but very pixelated, then slowly get more detail as more of the image downloaded.

Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading

#77

Post by ed_mercer »

lxgr wrote: post #54
duxup wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

Most content-heavy media sites make use of CDNs, and the expenses involved are generally reasonable. It's unlikely that a slightly heavier image would have a significant impact on their costs.

I think this might be more of a well-intentioned effort to help end-users save on bandwidth, but it could lead to a bad experience as OP pointed out in their blog post.

Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading

#78

Post by nicbou »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #25
nicbou wrote: post #15

I 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…

it hurts SEO. In my case the user can live without those images, so it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. This is one of the big problems with the modern web, It puts you in this doom loop: sacrifice the user to please Google to get users.

I agree wholeheartedly, although for the most part the performance metrics match my needs as a user.

In this case it means preserving bandwidth unless it's needed. I lazyload images for the same reason I serve 4 different image sizes.

Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading

#79

Post by matheusmoreira »

rcme wrote: post #64
matheusmoreira wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't need to. They can infer based on the size and timing of the transfers. Nothing for a while then suddenly a huge download? Probably a picture. If the sizes are unique enough they might even figure out which. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis To stop this, we'd have to saturate the link 100% of the time even when no useful communications are taking place.

But how do they know what you're looking at and how are they using this information to do anything useful? I get you can probably differentiate between text and video, but I'm having trouble understanding exactly what information they would get from your bandwidth consumption.

If there's an image of size X and they observe a download of X bytes, they can infer you downloaded and possibly looked at that image. The file size alone might be unique enough to allow that.

What they do with this information is anyone's guess. Just viewing something could put you into some kind of government watchlist. They could use parallel construction against you.

Re: I think I kind of hate lazy loading

#80

Post by lancefisher »

mouse_ wrote: post #45
brink wrote: post #16

Eh, mistakenly clicking an ad or irrelevant content when trying to click a link because the page loaded some async content at the last millisecond is far worse.

They do that on purpose.

It’s a data driven decision. They a/b tested and found users were more interested in clicking on ads when images were lazy loaded.
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