Google Chrome will soon support something called LazyLoad, a feature that allows browsers to delay the loading of out-of-view images and iframes until the user scrolls near them, shared Scott Little, a Chromium developer yesterday.
Why LazyLoad is introduced?
Very often, web pages have images and other embedded content like ads placed below the fold and users don’t always end up scrolling all the way down. LazyLoad tries to take the advantage of this behavior to optimize the web browser by loading the important content much faster and hence reducing the network data and memory usage.
LazyLoad waits to load images and iframes that are out of view until the user scrolls near them. It is up to the browser to decide exactly how “near”, but it should typically start loading the out-of-view content some distance before the content comes in view.
Currently, there are few JavaScript libraries that can be used for lazy loading images or other kinds of content. But, natively supporting such feature in the browser itself will make it easier for websites to take advantage of lazy loading. Additionally, with this feature browsers will be able to automatically find and load content that are suitable for lazy loading.
The LazyLoad solution will be supported on all platforms. Web pages just need to use loading=”lazy” on the img and iframe elements. For Android Chrome users who have Data Saver turned on, elements with loading=”auto” or unset will also be lazily loaded if Chrome finds them to be good candidates for lazy loading based on heuristics. If you set loading=”eager” on the image or iframe element they will not be lazily loaded.
To read more in detail about LazyLoad, check out its GitHub repository.
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