I think I kind of hate lazy loading
Yesterday I was on a train. I clicked on a link and my browser loaded a long article for me to read. Halfway through reading it, the train went into a tunnel and I lost signal.
That meant I couldn't see the images on the other half of the page for the rest of the journey. I had a sea of broken images.

Even though the page had fully loaded, the images were set to "lazy" loading. When my browser sees <img src="example.jpg" loading="lazy" />
it defers downloading the picture until it is about to scroll into view.
There's a few reasons why this is a good thing. If I leave the page before scrolling down, the browser doesn't waste time, energy, or bandwidth downloading images which will never be seen. That's good for my battery life and cheaper for my bill. It also saves the server from flinging bits around the world which are promptly trashed0.
And yet...
It seems that every time I'm on a train - or somewhere else with spotty Internet access - I run in to a situation where I previously had plenty of bandwidth and battery, but my user-agent decided it knew best. So it didn't attempt to load images until after I lost signal.
There's no way to disable Lazy Loading on Android Chrome or Android Firefox.
So, I guess I'm stuck. Lazy loading seems like one of those things which is great in certain circumstances, but has a pretty horrible failure mode1.
Anyone else feel this way?
Ian says:
DinoNerd says:
<img>
tag is some hyper-advanced new addition to the HTML standards that not everyone uses yet. I also hate low-quality temporary stand-in images. They're all about making a page "look" full without actually providing any function or improvement to the user; ie I think they're vanity. Not once has a blurry image in an article or post ever given me any value. "Page-res" versions that link to high-res versions work, but "thumbnail" res versions only works if your pictures are unlabelled and the user needs to sift through dozens to find one (ie an album rather than a standard webpage). Otherwise they're useless, the user knows the context of your image and wants the actual detail, not a vaseline smeared photograph.Tim says:
mikael says:
@edent says:
mikael says:
raizo says:
ReD says:
@edent says:
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