Google Chrome Will Release Lazy Load Feature

Known as the world’s most advanced web browser, Google Chrome will soon release a new feature that will be very helpful for those people who have a slow internet connection and are trying to consume lesser data.

Lazy load feature in a web browser downloads the things that you need to see first on a website. By default, it may download the content with smaller data first like the text before it downloads the content with bigger data like the images and videos, but you may also set it to download the images or videos first if these are the things that you need to see first.

Lazy load is the opposite of the eager load which most of us have in our current web browsers. Eager load is a network protocol that downloads everything (the text, images, and videos) at the same time. In this case, the lazy load can speed up browsing more than eager load can do.

The lazy load feature first became available just last year in Google’s Chrome Canary (another type of Google browser mostly used by web developers). By the month of May this year, every Google Chrome user will experience this new feature as they release their version 75 with lazy load as the default protocol.

Tech experts who have tried the lazy load feature in Canary said that they hardly noticed the difference in the way websites load compared to non-lazy load browsers.

See the example on how to implement lazy loading on Google Chrome

<img src="celebration.jpg" loading="lazy" alt="..." />

What’s more interesting about the loading attribute is it lets the browser postpone the loading of off-screen images and iframes until user scroll near them. In that case you may also save data, because if you won’t scroll at them, it won’t load and won’t eat up any data.
loading can support three values:

  • lazy: fair option for lazy loading
  • eager: not satisfactory for lazy loading because it loads everything at the same time
  • auto: browser decides whether to lazy load or not

Since the Philippines is believed to have the slowest internet connection in the world, and our internet providers have not fixed this problem yet, for the meantime lazy load feature might be of help for all of us who use the internet and wish to speed up browsing.

Source: https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5645767347798016