Lazy Load IFRAMEs

By  on  

We've known for a decade that lazy loading resources like JavaScript, CSS, and especially images is a massive performance win for web pages. At first we used tricks and JavaScript to do the lazy loading, but more recently native image lazy loading has debuted in browsers.

Did you know that you can also lazy load IFRAMEs using the same loading="lazy" attribute and value?

<iframe 
    src="https://davidwalsh.name/"
    loading="lazy"
    onload="alert('Loaded!');"
/>

You can see how lazy loading IFRAMEs works with this demo:

See the Pen IFRAME Lazy Load by David Walsh (@darkwing) on CodePen.

This single attribute to perform a complex but useful operation is the ideal solution for lazy loading just about anything. I'm so thankful that browsers are implementing APIs that make using best practices so easy!

Recent Features

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn&#8217;t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

  • By
    Chris Coyier&#8217;s Favorite CodePen Demos II

    Hey everyone! Before we get started, I just want to say it's damn hard to pick this few favorites on CodePen. Not because, as a co-founder of CodePen, I feel like a dad picking which kid he likes best (RUDE). But because there is just so...

Discussion

  1. This browser feature looks really like a huge gamechanger. Would love so much to use it with profit although it doesn’t seem to work correctly for me.

    [First of all, using it with images instead of iframes always worked perfectly, so all this regards only loading=”lazy” for iframes.]

    After hours of testing on different pages, what I see is that using loading=”lazy”, Iframes load WAY TOO EARLY.

    This apparently buggy behavior happens only if the page itself is NOT loaded from another iframe. So this rules out CodePen as a viable tool to show this.

    Let’s make a text.html file from this code, almost identical to your example, to highlight exactly what I’m saying:
    https://gist.github.com/jeff-at-livecanvas/bb1a803465419c62d623305daf6722cd

    Opening this file in a Chrome window, with an internal height of 700 pixels, shows the Loaded! message immediately.
    Same happens with latest Firefox too.

    Would be great if somebody could shed some light on this.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!