The experience you describe is with JavaScript lazy loaders which don’t have this awareness.
I have Bromite configured with DoH that almost blinds my ISP as well as Tor Browser.
Privacy Browser disables JavaScript by default, with an easy toggle to enable it, which is invaluable for taming many sites with obtrusive scripting.
I use Firefox Focus with the bundled libgecko for general browsing.
If I tried this on a Microsoft platform, I would constantly be advised not to do this.
I wish there was a good WebKit browser for Android, just for diversity.
A real mobile Webkit would make testing for iOS a hell of a lot easier. I'm not planning for buying a mac just to run a browser, we're not living in 2010 anymore. Even Microsoft bothers to provide free VMs for developers to run their browser tests in.
The primary use case is to not load images you may not ever see because you may not scroll that far down the page and they don't appear in the viewport.
Like any feature, it has to be used correctly by the developer… obviously hero images and other images important to the initial user experience shouldn't be lazy loaded.
That is the "bandwith saving" part. It's user hostile because it is another non-JS privacy leak and because it means that you can no longer open a website to read later when you might not have internet access.
> obviously hero images and other images important to the initial user experience
Hero images are typically the most pointless and irrelevant to the user experience. If you want to save bandwidth then push back against this fad.
Where without lazy loading they could normally get up and get a cup of coffee and come back, you are now actively wasting their time as they scroll.
It's good for mobile devices, since you can save on usage caps (which should be illegal, but that's a digression).
It’s horrible UX when you open a bunch of tabs in the background and then when you try to read them, they haven’t loaded properly. Especially if you are on a train or something where your Internet connection is spotty and they could have loaded at the point you opened the tab, but now they cannot.
The main improvement here is that if it is built into the browser instead of implemented individually on each site with JavaScript, there’s a better chance you’ll be able to disable it globally.
Also lazy loading enables the bandwidth that is available to be used on critical path items and not on images further down the page, especially if they’re non-origin images that require the overhead of another TLS handshake + connection, etc.
You don’t get the benefit of HTTP/2 prioritization with non-origin connections.
It can easily be the vast majority of bandwidth spend even on a lightweight site. Add video widgets and bring that closer to 99%. Lazy loading is frequently a "can afford an extra 5 full time engineers" optimization
I find this figure suspect. I work on a site with millions of users whose core service is essentially displaying a stream of images to end users, and our spend on CDN bandwidth is barely into five figures
A small video site might start at 3 Gbit/s, a medium sized one closer to 30. These estimates really are quite conservative depending on the context
Poorly implemented lazy loading of images is probably the culprit here
Maybe there's hope that I can then just turn this off on a browser level? I've got gigabit internet at home, and your images popping in on scroll makes it feel like I'm on dial up.
Lazy loading images is at best user hostile bandwidth saving, and it's not even that much in this day and age.