Like he said, what a waste of time! You had all that time while I was reading to do some loading in the background.

The key here though, is to continue to load things you think the user will most likely want, in the background. In a way that doesn’t disrupt at all. If something that I don’t need immediately, it should be getting loaded in a non-disruptive way that doesn’t freeze up or slow down my browser.

I’d argue that superfast broadband users would suffer even more from this feature than dialup users, simply because we’re NOT used to waiting around for anything to load.

Sure for the most part, many images don’t even take a second to load, but they’re not always tiny and the time they take is never zero. If it were, I’d be all for lazy loading.

But unfortunately my experience as a broadband user would change from…

Page loads completely, then new information appears INSTANTLY as I scroll down to it, because everything is already there

…to…

Page loads, then as I scroll down my browser fires off a HTTP request for more data, I see an empty space where some content is going to be soon, whatever “LOADING” indicators my browser has are activated, the image loads, browser “LOADING” indicators deactivate, rinse and repeat for every little touch of the scroll wheel.

It takes the reliability out of the simple act of scrolling. I’m happy to scroll in my browser at the moment, I know that the act of doing so isn’t going to load new content in the way that clicking a control on the page might.

If this feature is implemented, the simple act of scrolling gets a whole lot more unpredictable for your users, which is a bad thing.

If images took time to load, I’d agree with you, it would be detrimental to the user experiece but nowadays images don’t take even a second to load as broadband speeds increase.

However, if people suffer (be it a slow connection) because of the images etc. loading then they could turn the feature off the browser. I would in that case, it’s not that important a feature.

That said, if the buck was passed on to us web devs for that, I personally wouldn’t bother with it on stuff I make.

Lazy loading is hardly efficient. As I said, it’s akin to having a car that remains off any time you aren’t moving, and has to turn itself on when you press the gas pedal. Your driving experience is going to be quite frustrating having to wait that relatively small amount of time for the car to start every time you want to move further ahead (like waiting for images to load every time you want to scroll down).

It’s a very well-intentioned idea, but when push comes to shove, it’s detrimental to the user experience, which, as web designers, should be our first priority, should it not? Besides… the developer can already choose to implement lazy loading via Javascript without bothering browser developers for yet another feature that stands no chance of being standardized ;)

If we could conserve a little fuel efficiently, why wouldn’t we? Hybrid cars are getting popular for a reason.

@David

Good topic…. worms everywhere ;)

@Ben & @David

I agree that if the developer fails the user should suffer. That’s what makes some sites popular and others failures.

If lazy loading is a popular/useful feature then browsers should adopt it (and make it optional for ppl that just don’t want it), if not then probably not something I personally would take on and if some devs want to, if their site is a success then who cares?

The problem as I’ve experienced it: There are a whole bunch of images, and they don’t load in order. I want to scroll down and look at the images in order, but have to wait for every image on the page to load to be sure that I can do so.

Alternative solution to lazy-loading: Browsers ensure (optionally) that images are loaded in the order they appear in the markup. The second image doesn’t begin loading until the first one has fully loaded, and so on.

Now this doesn’t address the fact that users still need to download everything on the page, and servers still need to serve it all up. However it does address the one and only usability issue (besides scroll wheel-induced RSI) I’ve ever had with these pages.

I think that if the former problem is really an issue for you, the tools are already out there for you to alleviate that – thumbnail based image galleries, slideshows, lightboxes, etc.

But if you are really want to ignore those tools and build a page with a massive amount of content all there from the get-go, you should implement my solution and stop ignoring the elephant in the room: you have built a page with a massive amount of content. If neither you or your users want to see all that content, WHY IS IT THERE?!

Why do vehicles idle? It’s a waste of gas. Isn’t it better to start your car once when you get in it than at every stop light just to conserve a relatively small amount of time and fuel?

Convenience trumps conservatism every time, my friend.