Chrome 148 Will Start 'Lazy Loading' Video and Audio to Improve Performance (pcworld.com) 43
"Google has announced that it's currently testing a new feature for Chrome 148 that could speed up day-to-day browsing," reports PC World:
[T]he browser can intelligently postpone the loading of certain elements. Why load all images at the start when it can instead load images as you get close to them while scrolling? Chrome and Chromium-based browsers have had built-in lazy loading support for images and iframes since 2019, but this feature would make browsers capable of lazy loading video and audio elements, too. Note, however, that this won't benefit YouTube video embeds — those are already lazy loadable since they're embedded using iframes. Actual video and audio elements are rarer but not uncommon. In addition to Chrome, lazy loading of video and audio elements is also expected to be added to other Chromium-based browsers, including Microsoft Edge and Vivaldi.
Nah (Score:2)
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Can be useful when you have a limited amount of data.
Download with eager loading and read offline (Score:2)
In my experience on laptops and tablets, I've found the exact opposite (eager loading) helpful in some situations with limited or no data. I would download an entire page on unmetered Wi-Fi, go offline, and read while riding as a passenger in a car or bus.
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Same, but sucked when /. still had that "lets refresh the page every few minutes" bullshit idea.
Lazy loading is helpful on phones etc. saves you data.
To speed up browsing (Score:1)
Don't download load the tracking and advertising crap!
Re:To speed up browsing (Score:4, Informative)
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been blocking adverts for over 2 decades now. long live easylist
How about only after interaction? (Score:2)
In general they've been on the right trend of only playing after interactions.
Most of the time they're ads, and even if they do manage to slip through my ad blocks and DNS fliters, I still don't want them playing.
Waste of bandwidth.
No auto load/play, period (Score:5, Insightful)
No video (or animated image) should ever load/autoplay unless the user interacts with that element, indicating he/she wants to play it. Same with audio.
That is how I have Firefox set up. I can't imagine why anyone would want something different, unless the user wants to whitelist the site (like I do with my video cameras, since I do want those to play automatically).
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It can buffer without playing.
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>"It can buffer without playing."
True. Anything is better than autoplaying. Although I would prefer delaying buffering as well. I don't care that it might take 2 seconds longer to start a video, later.
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But most videos won't. Sites only send like the next 1-2 minutes and you need to watch the video or seek in it to get the next segment.
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Disagree heavily. You should absolutely load. Autoplay absolutely is a cancer and entirely within the control of the user, but when the user hits that play button that video better play instantly and not sit there buffering or loading. Lazyloading is a good thing that makes the internet appear far more responsive.
Tap or click to view article (Score:2)
No video (or animated image) should ever load/autoplay unless the user interacts with that element, indicating he/she wants to play it.
How granular would the permission be? If web browsers start blocking all animation and post-load layout shifting by default, including CSS transitions and animations [pineight.com], this would encourage website operators to structure the page to coerce permission to animate in each document. For example, a website operator could make each page load blank other than a notice to the effect "Tap or click to view 'Title of Article' on Name of Site."
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>"For example, a website operator could make each page load blank other than a notice to the effect "Tap or click to view 'Title of Article' on Name of Site."
Yeah, I have seen some of that already. Some web developers are just plain evil.
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>"How exactly would they serve us the ads?"
With text and static images.
I am skeptical (Score:2)
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Absolute Shit (Score:3)
This is just total ass because people have over-bloated the web. I don't need 20-50 MB pictures on a little screen. I don't need all the bloated java bullshit that companies, especially news media companies, are filling their pages with.
This is another symptom of shitty programmers using 100 different pre-made libraries all of which are shitty and bloated to begin with, along with oversize graphics and hundreds of links to third party ad servers all using bandwidth that's utterly unrelated to the actual content I want to read.
Java hasn't been in the browser for 10+ years (Score:2)
This is another symptom of shitty programmers using 100 different pre-made libraries all of which are shitty and bloated to begin with, along with oversize graphics and hundreds of links to third party ad servers all using bandwidth that's utterly unrelated to the actual content I want to read.
All your complaints? They're not Java. Java kept in it's own little sandbox. Java applets sucked and were solution looking for a problem outside a few novelty browser games. However, Java has been absent for browsers for almost 20 years. All the vendors removed support 10 years ago now. It began a very steep decline once the iPhone was introduced and Apple refused to support it.
Java has been a server side technology since the early 2000s. It doesn't even render HTML very much any more. It only pr
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Loading a webpage shouldn't bog down a $4000 MacBook Pro...but the shitty front-end dev community said "M4 should easily be able to load my stupid and simple website?"...."Challenge accepted!"
Does it actually bog down a reasonably-speced computer? I don't think it does, I think the sluggishness is just from the sheer volume of stuff that has to be downloaded, and the inefficient way it's downloaded. And the reason the web devs don't notice the awfulness is (a) their browsers have 98% of it cached and (b) they have a GigE (or 10 GigE) connection to the server. They certainly don't have computers faster than your M4.
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Your knowledge about JavaScript is outdated as much as your parents knowledge about Java.
If you do not like dynamic typed languages: don't use them. Simple.
Otherwise JavaScript is utterly fine, and the de facto standard for full stack development.
care to explain? (Score:2)
Your knowledge about JavaScript is outdated as much as your parents knowledge about Java.
If you do not like dynamic typed languages: don't use them. Simple.
Otherwise JavaScript is utterly fine, and the de facto standard for full stack development.
Kewl insult. Do you have an explanation?...or are too lazy to justify your comment?
Also, your logic is stupid. I'm not authoring the goddamn page, I am just trying to buy a product or do some research or use an app. I have no choice in the tooling someone else uses.
Also, it's not the defacto standard for full stack development. That's wishful thinking on your part so you'll not have to open a book and learn another language. Java still has greater penetration among anyone who has a budget and knows
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Perhaps you should learn what full stack development means. Java or Scala etc. on the backend and HTML, JavaScript on the front end: is not full stack. It is two half stacks. Facepalm.
The rest of your rant is pretty pointless, did you just google Vue.js etc. or did you know about them in advance?
You use frameworks to write less code.
It is a difference if I have to write 1000lines by hand for brain dead simple html nonsense, or only 100 lines, easy to read which are backed up by a framework.
Point is: Java in
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It’s already broken because sites have so much content hidden behind collapsible text. I’ve already had to view the page source to ctrl f something.
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So, cntrl-f search is broken because it's not loaded. I can't scroll down quickly because it does the constant stop-and-buffer routine.
Continuous scrolling content has nothing to do with this article. This article is about Chrome, and Ctrl+F works fine for all loaded content, you are misdirecting your anger in a comment to the wrong article. Also you can't load infinitely. You can't Ctrl+F the second page of Slashdot while on the first page either.
This is another symptom of shitty programmers using 100 different pre-made libraries all of which are shitty and bloated to begin with, along with oversize graphics and hundreds of links to third party ad servers all using bandwidth that's utterly unrelated to the actual content I want to read.
This has nothing to do with anything. You are making a completely off-topic rant. Continuous scrolling pages are not a symptom of using a pre-made libarary. It's a choice for displaying content.
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It doesn't affect text so ctrl F still works. The rest can be mitigated by supplying element sizes in the HTML.
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Java in the browser does not exist since ... a decade or so.
And never was a big thing anyway.
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You're a little out of date. Java hasn't really been part of the web for... well, I believe the Java plugin was effectively removed from most browsers a decade ago, and wasn't used much after the early 2000s despite the initial hype.
The web is bloated these days, but Java has nothing to do with it.
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Wouldn't a better description be load-on-demand?
Lazy-loading is not load on demand. It's literally loading it when it gets close to the viewport, in advance, before the user actually sees it or clicks on it. It's the middle thing between loading on demand, and pre-loading every element on the page.
Lazy loading images sucks when you're offline (Score:2)
Why load all images at the start when it can instead load images as you get close to them while scrolling?
That's all fine and good if you have connectivity when you're scrolling.
When I'm getting ready to fly, I preload about 50 tabs in my browser so I have something to read. It is a horrible PITA to hand-scroll each tab down to the bottom so all its images load.
It's even worse when the browser crashes. Because then I get to do that again, for every tab. Usually on crappy airport or hotel WiFi.
Sure, load all the images after the text. But please do load them all, rather than waiting until I scroll.
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The internet is dynamic. Lazy loading is an optimisation technique that makes the browser experience better for the 99.99% of people currently *not* sitting at the airport about to board a flight.
What you really want to do is save the page. Chrome has that function, though I suspect it will have other problems, but it very much does load all images and make the page static (many webpages have an expiry / timeout period so even if you pre-loaded the tab, activating it 30min later will cause it to attempt to
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What you really want to do is save the page.
Save as single file (.mhtml) isn't too awful in most cases.
Print to PDF may work too?
Amazingly poorly. Things like floating frames/headers/footers render on each page. But the amount of scroll between pages doesn't take that into account. So the headers obscure actual bits of the main frame/article on subsequent pages.
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Chrome, in general, is designed to be always refreshing, always downloading adverts, so the first step to offline browsing is switching to
What's wrong with the API? (Score:2)
Isn't there an API for lazy loading? What's wrong with that? Developers not using it? They should be very careful of trying to outsmart dumb web "developers", the Web is messy enough as it is.
Needs to be optional (Score:3)
As long as I can turn it off, I don't give a rat's ass what stupid, annoying, and bandwidth-eating "features" they put into Chrome.
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As long as I can turn it off, I don't give a rat's ass what stupid, annoying, and bandwidth-eating "features" they put into Chrome.
I think you didn't understand what this feature is. It's pretty much the opposite of annoying, and it has no effect at all on bandwidth consumption. Though I suppose when devs get used to their sites seeming to load faster they'll bloat them up even more...
Google's "lazy loading" has been around a whilenow (Score:1)
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What about sound? (Score:1)
They should fix the problem that sound on youtube is so low, that my laptop on full output is hard to understand. ... there comes an advertizdement and BANG! The windows are about to fly out.
And then