Websites and apps continue to become more complex, which is why Google is constantly working on new performance improvements for its Chrome browser. Now the company is testing a new experiment that could lead to faster loading times.
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A long time ago, web browsers used to load all the content on a page at once, such as images, embedded plugins, and more. Over time, browsers and websites started to switch to “ lazy loading ,” where some content isn’t loaded until it’s visible. For example, a website might not load a video until halfway down the page, until you scroll down to that point.
Google Chrome has supported lazy loading for most embedded objects, such as videos and PDFs, since July 2020. To avoid the violation, Chrome only loads embedded content if the page specifically allows it. However, Google is now testing a new experiment that will automatically load some embedded content without the page asking for it.
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The new experiment, called “LazyEmbeds,” is planned to launch with 1% of people running the stable version of Chrome 104 (expected to be released on August 2). Embedded content that meets certain criteria (hosted by a third-party site, source matches a select list, frame size, etc.) will not load until it is visible on the page, such as images and other embeds that have opted into lazy loading.
Google hopes the feature could bring the performance and battery life benefits of lazy loading to even more pages, without breaking any websites in the process. The explanatory document says, “it’s not uncommon for an integration to request and execute large amounts of script, which can have a dramatic impact on the performance of the parent page.”
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Google said in 2020 that lazy loading YouTube on Chrome.com reduced mobile loading times by 10 seconds, and lazy loading Instagram integrations saved more than 1 MB of data usage. These improvements would be great to have on more pages, but we'll have to wait for the results of the experiment to see if it breaks any sites. If it works, the feature should also come to other Chromium-based web browsers, such as Microsoft Edge, Brave, and Vivaldi.
