In my experience it's more user hostile the worse your connection, because they have to sit and watch the images load for an even longer amount of time than I do, whereas it could have kept loading for them ahead of time.

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.

If the person is viewing a gallery website, perhaps, but most websites are centered around textual content, which would be available much faster with lazy loading of images, thus the user on poor connection would actually get the _useful_ part of a website much faster.

When you only have 2GB a month of mobile data, anything that saves a megabyte is worth it, even stuff like Google's data saver they used to have.

Honestly, it's more so. Greedy loading means that on a slower connection images will load before you scroll to them. If you're lazy loading, the request doesn't kick in until later, so you'll be waiting for images to load.

It's good for mobile devices, since you can save on usage caps (which should be illegal, but that's a digression).

It’s even more user hostile when your connection is not great.

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.

People forget that latency impacts web performance and not just bandwidth.

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.