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Chrome to get lazy load below-the-fold images and iframes

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Re: Chrome to get lazy load below-the-fold images and iframes

#31
post #28

No need to rely on IntersectionObserver() or even for JavaScript to be enabled -- Adtech vendors (like Google) can now detect scroll position server-side!

At least they're up-front about it[0]?

[0] - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e8ZbVyUwgIkQMvJma3kKUDg8...

Re: Chrome to get lazy load below-the-fold images and iframes

#32

The post says "Firefox: No public signals" - does that mean there is no word from Firefox if it'll be implemented in Firefox?

Considering the privacy issues (see bsdetector's comment [0]), I'm not sure they'd willingly add this. They may end up not having much choice because of the "positive" aspects of the feature being too much of an advantage in chrome, but this feature doesn't seem to fit their philosophy.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19602877 > Under "privacy considerations": "so slightly more information about the user's scrolling position on the embedding page is exposed" and "a deferred cross-origin image gets an additional piece of information about the user's scrolling position".

Re: Chrome to get lazy load below-the-fold images and iframes

#33

Why they say they are pushing this: * "Speed up the load of above-the-fold content, since there will be less competition for network resources during the initial page load" Why don't they just set a low priority for offscreen images and resources? Isn't this the entire premise for HTTP/2, that multiplexing with priorities and flow control would load the important data first? Do servers not implement the spec correctl…

You seem to be missing a few things: - data usage is correlated with battery usage, which is important on mobile - the http2 prioritization point is only half valid. Two big assumptions that probably don't hold in practice: whether the implementations actually implement priority correctly, all the way through the stack (e.g. perhaps some servers have a suboptimal implementation?), And whether having a bazillion low priority image requests can hit some slowness - e.g. I would expect there to be some limit on how many streams http2 implementations will allow simultaneously. And lastly, http2 is based on tcp so even if the prioritization is good, changing the priorities as the user scrolls means that the bytes currently transferring are likely less important and holding up the more important response - which is probably not a big deal on a good network but with any amount of packet loss will introduce lots of extra delay.

Re: Chrome to get lazy load below-the-fold images and iframes

#34

Why they say they are pushing this: * "Speed up the load of above-the-fold content, since there will be less competition for network resources during the initial page load" Why don't they just set a low priority for offscreen images and resources? Isn't this the entire premise for HTTP/2, that multiplexing with priorities and flow control would load the important data first? Do servers not implement the spec correctl…

You seem to be missing a few things: - data usage is correlated with battery usage, which is important on mobile - the http2 prioritization point is only half valid. Two big assumptions that probably don't hold in practice: whether the implementations actually implement priority correctly, all the way through the stack (e.g. perhaps some servers have a suboptimal implementation?), And whether having a bazillion low p…

Their own customers are using less than 15 GB per month, how much battery could they possibly save on the radio? A single video will use more radio time than days of image downloads in the browser. Furthermore, Google themselves didn't mention battery savings but just fewer bytes sent.

And what delicious irony if they couldn't solve this with HTTP/2 because of servers not implementing the spec correctly or having weird undocumented quirks (their reason for not enabling pipelining despite it working just fine).

Re: Chrome to get lazy load below-the-fold images and iframes

#35

The downside of this is that it assumes that I am always online, and I can never know if a page has finished loading. Say I load an article in a background tab to read later, then go somewhere without WiFi like, say, an airplane. I read the first page, hit the space bar, and see gray boxes. Now I need to either scroll all the way through any article I want to read later (unless "infinite scroll" happens), or save it…

I agree, these websites already cause a new pattern of “quickly scroll to the bottom to make sure everything’s loaded” I basically have to do this now before I board a train.

It’s good they’re implementing this, but it will mislead people to thinking the whole website is ready to use. It’s a shame an option couldn’t be “load the rest after page load”.

Re: Chrome to get lazy load below-the-fold images and iframes

#37

Why they say they are pushing this: * "Speed up the load of above-the-fold content, since there will be less competition for network resources during the initial page load" Why don't they just set a low priority for offscreen images and resources? Isn't this the entire premise for HTTP/2, that multiplexing with priorities and flow control would load the important data first? Do servers not implement the spec correctl…

> Most phone plans are unlimited or have data capable of watching movies. On Google's own Fi plan "less than 1% of individual Fi users ... use above 15 GB".

I use Google Fi and I use less than one gigabyte a month: not because I'd like to, but because I don't want to pay for mobile data when I don't have to.

Re: Chrome to get lazy load below-the-fold images and iframes

#38

Why they say they are pushing this: * "Speed up the load of above-the-fold content, since there will be less competition for network resources during the initial page load" Why don't they just set a low priority for offscreen images and resources? Isn't this the entire premise for HTTP/2, that multiplexing with priorities and flow control would load the important data first? Do servers not implement the spec correctl…

Wow, how can this conspiracy-theory-like nonsense be voted to the top of the comments? I thought Hacker News was a rational place.

The reality is that lazy loading images really does help webpage performance, especially on mobile. You cannot properly implement it in the browser without additional information from the page developer - because you'll never know which images are so important that they will always need to be loaded, and which ones can be lazy loaded once they're almost in view.

We're talking about the addition of one attribute to the tag here. There's no conspiracy, and there's no ulterior motive.

Re: Chrome to get lazy load below-the-fold images and iframes

#39

Why they say they are pushing this: * "Speed up the load of above-the-fold content, since there will be less competition for network resources during the initial page load" Why don't they just set a low priority for offscreen images and resources? Isn't this the entire premise for HTTP/2, that multiplexing with priorities and flow control would load the important data first? Do servers not implement the spec correctl…

> This is not hard to figure out - they are barely even trying to hide it.

You meant to say that are aren't trying to hide it, right?

Re: Chrome to get lazy load below-the-fold images and iframes

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be missing a few things: - data usage is correlated with battery usage, which is important on mobile - the http2 prioritization point is only half valid. Two big assumptions that probably don't hold in practice: whether the implementations actually implement priority correctly, all the way through the stack (e.g. perhaps some servers have a suboptimal implementation?), And whether having a bazillion low p…

Their own customers are using less than 15 GB per month, how much battery could they possibly save on the radio? A single video will use more radio time than days of image downloads in the browser. Furthermore, Google themselves didn't mention battery savings but just fewer bytes sent. And what delicious irony if they couldn't solve this with HTTP/2 because of servers not implementing the spec correctly or having wei…

Who are their customers?
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