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by capableweb 1153 days ago
It's also one of those things where no matter what you do, someone will hate it and other will love it.

Lazy load images? People with bandwidth quotas might praise you. Others with sporadic connections will despise it, because they can't load the page once and revisit the already fully loaded tab when internet disappears. People with high bandwidth and no quotas will barely notice anything, unless they are quick readers, then they'll blame you for not loading the images quickly enough.

Not lazy load images? Everything vice-versa.
1 comments
Dalewyn 1153 days ago
This is a feature that should be determined by the user agent rather than the server. It's the user agent that is aware of bandwidth limitations and desires of the user, after all.
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capableweb 1153 days ago
Believe it or not, but websites could already implement it based on what the user-agent knows about the connection already. `navigator.connection` (returns NetworkInformation - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NetworkInfo...) supposedly holds what the user-agent thinks the connection-type is. Although not implemented in Safari nor Firefox.

Although I do think there are concerns around privacy when it comes to adding more bits people can use to track you, which is probably why it's not implemented in Safari or Firefox yet.

Automatically doing lazy-loading of <img/> tags based on information not shared with the websites probably would break random websites that depend on being able to load images outside of the view of the user, for one reason or another, so probably won't be possible to fix by now.

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account42 1153 days ago
> Believe it or not, but websites could already implement it based on what the user-agent knows about the connection already. `navigator.connection` (returns NetworkInformation - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NetworkInfo...) supposedly holds what the user-agent thinks the connection-type is. Although not implemented in Safari nor Firefox.

This is absolutely the wrong way around. I don't care much for lazy loading but if you must add it then use the loading="lazy" hint and let the browser decide based on that. Don't try to be smart, e.g. navigator.connection won't tell you that I'm about to get on a plane where I won't have internet at all.

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