Except it actually makes the problem worse Nope. On real world websites, deferring images, fonts, and making other optimizations can reduce time-to-first paint

Except it actually makes the problem worse Nope. On real world websites, deferring images, fonts, and making other optimizations can reduce time-to-first paint significantly. That drives real UX and business results (imagine clicking a link and waiting for 7 seconds to see the heading on the page vs. waiting 1.5 seconds.) There's a reason all these websites practice lazy-loading and Google takes time-to-first-render seriously enough to impact search ranking. If anything, that might be a sensible feature of mobile browsers Sure, I would be happy if browsers introduced something like a "lazyload" attribute on images/JS/fonts etc. There is something like that for <script> tags (defer, async) but it still downloads the script ASAP. I need something that gets the text and CSS, shows it on the page, and then opens the HTTP connections for other stuff.