Lazy Load IFRAMEs
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:
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!
![Designing for Simplicity]()
Before we get started, it's worth me spending a brief moment introducing myself to you. My name is Mark (or @integralist if Twitter happens to be your communication tool of choice) and I currently work for BBC News in London England as a principal engineer/tech...
![How to Create a Twitter Card]()
One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook. Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...
![MooTools Typewriter Effect Plugin Upgrade]()
Last week I shared my MooTools Typewriter Class with you. It was pretty well received and I got a few feature requests that I've implemented including "backspacing" and character variance delays. I'm not going to explain the old code, so click here...
![9 Incredible CodePen Demos]()
CodePen is a treasure trove of incredible demos harnessing the power of client side languages. The client side is always limited by what browsers provide us but the creativity and cleverness of developers always pushes the boundaries of what we think the front end can do. Thanks to CSS...
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.