4 ms·

Why they say they are pushing this: * "Speed up the load of above-the-fold content, since there will be less competition for network resources during the initi

Why they say they are pushing this: * "Speed up the load of above-the-fold content, since there will be less competition for network resources during the initial page load" Why don't they just set a low priority for offscreen images and resources? Isn't this the entire premise for HTTP/2, that multiplexing with priorities and flow control would load the important data first? Do servers not implement the spec correctly? So this reason is BS as the data saved is immaterial. * "Reduce memory usage." Even commodity phones come with several gigabytes of RAM, the memory may have to be used anyway if the user scrolls, and if you have unlimited scroll or massive scroll something will need to unload data anyway. So this reason is marginal at best. * "Save network data by avoiding downloading any deferred content that the user doesn't end up scrolling to" Most phone plans are unlimited or have data capable of watching movies. On Google's own Fi plan "less than 1% of individual Fi users ... use above 15 GB". So this is another BS reason as the data saved is immaterial. So why are they actually pushing this? Under "privacy considerations": "so slightly more information about the user's scrolling position on the embedding page is exposed" and "a deferred cross-origin image gets an additional piece of information about the user's scrolling position". This is not hard to figure out - they are barely even trying to hide it. Same thing as pushing HTTP/2, which I contend was at least partly to track people using socket IP:port address (for instance by keeping a single connection to google-analytics open that all domains' data goes through and boosting the connection keep alive from a few minutes to like half an hour, which they did).

dgoldstein0 8y ago
You seem to be missing a few things: - data usage is correlated with battery usage, which is important on mobile - the http2 prioritization point is only half valid. Two big assumptions that probably don't hold in practice: whether the implementations actually implement priority correctly, all the way through the stack (e.g. perhaps some servers have a suboptimal implementation?), And whether having a bazillion low priority image requests can hit some slowness - e.g. I would expect there to be some limit on how many streams http2 implementations will allow simultaneously. And lastly, http2 is based on tcp so even if the prioritization is good, changing the priorities as the user scrolls means that the bytes currently transferring are likely less important and holding up the more important response - which is probably not a big deal on a good network but with any amount of packet loss will introduce lots of extra delay.
- bsdetector 8y ago
  Their own customers are using less than 15 GB per month, how much battery could they possibly save on the radio? A single video will use more radio time than days of image downloads in the browser. Furthermore, Google themselves didn't mention battery savings but just fewer bytes sent. And what delicious irony if they couldn't solve this with HTTP/2 because of servers not implementing the spec correctly or having weird undocumented quirks (their reason for not enabling pipelining despite it working just fine).
  - mda 8y ago
    Who are their customers?
  - dgoldstein0 8y ago
    My previous phone - an HTC one m7 - had some battery issues when it was pretty new. I limited myself to something like 2 or 3gb per month on cellular data (because that was my plan) and yet I still had to charge my phone at work somedays. (It's not about battery over the whole month - it's about the worst case on any given day.) I learned to debug by looking at the system data usage monitors - the standard power usage per app wasn't helpful. Turned out the problem was just a data hungry photo app we were developing at the time. We made it nicer on data usage before we launched. And after all that, chrome was usually in my top 3 apps for data usage. Probably still is. So they absolutely should be optimizing it. Granted that was several years ago but in some parts of the world that phone would probably be better then what the average consumer uses today.
  - eh78ssxv2f 8y ago
    > Their own customers Can you explain what you mean? Chrome does not have any customers. > And what delicious irony if they couldn't solve this with HTTP/2 because of servers not implementing the spec correctly or having weird undocumented quirks (their reason for not enabling pipelining despite it working just fine). How do you envison the browser to solve this when the server is not H2 capable?
saagarjha 8y ago
> Most phone plans are unlimited or have data capable of watching movies. On Google's own Fi plan "less than 1% of individual Fi users ... use above 15 GB". I use Google Fi and I use less than one gigabyte a month: not because I'd like to, but because I don't want to pay for mobile data when I don't have to.
akie 8y ago
Wow, how can this conspiracy-theory-like nonsense be voted to the top of the comments? I thought Hacker News was a rational place. The reality is that lazy loading images really does help webpage performance, especially on mobile. You cannot properly implement it in the browser without additional information from the page developer - because you'll never know which images are so important that they will always need to be loaded, and which ones can be lazy loaded once they're almost in view. We're talking about the addition of one attribute to the <img> tag here. There's no conspiracy, and there's no ulterior motive.
- bsdetector 8y ago
  No we're talking about every website having to make this work because the default is to not require loading the resources or else be blamed for not being compliant with a spec forced on them by Google through their browser monopoly. Google should need some really good evidence to support this. What points do you disagree with, and why? Where are the metrics? If it's better performing than just priorities and flow control then by how much, and how do you justify breaking sites to achieve that margin?
  - chronogram 8y ago
    Then just don’t specify the loading=lazy tag...
    - bzbarsky 8y ago
      Doesn't matter. The actual discussion on blink-dev is pretty clear about the plan being for lack of that attribute to mean "use some heuristics of Google's choice to decide whether to lazy-load".
- simion314 8y ago
  Do you like the fact that Google can now create standards ? They have an idea, put it in Chrome and then ask Mozilla to catch up and implement the missing tags.
- sieabahlpark 8y ago
jasonvorhe 8y ago
> This is not hard to figure out - they are barely even trying to hide it. You meant to say that are aren't trying to hide it, right?
mda 8y ago
No, commodity phones in developing countries do not come with massive memories. Memory is the biggest issue for those. No, most phones do not have unlimited data at all. I am not even starting with your conspiracy theory. I am pretty sure when Chromium engineers look at same data for these decisions, but hey, maybe you have some numbers to share.
icebraining 8y ago
> Most phone plans are unlimited or have data capable of watching movies. On what do you base this claim? My experience is the opposite - most people I know have less than 3GB/month. Do you have any actual data?
- lucb1e 8y ago
  I agree with you, but the way I see GP's point is that people are not running out of data because of non lazy loaded images. If they were, they'd be complaining about how little they can browse or buying bigger subscriptions. It is also my experience that unlimited bundles (which aren't unlimited anyway, they're just limited to an amount that virtually nobody hits which is quite a difference from "we can make them use as much data as we want") are rare rather than the norm.

dgoldstein0 8y ago

You seem to be missing a few things: - data usage is correlated with battery usage, which is important on mobile - the http2 prioritization point is only half valid. Two big assumptions that probably don't hold in practice: whether the implementations actually implement priority correctly, all the way through the stack (e.g. perhaps some servers have a suboptimal implementation?), And whether having a bazillion low priority image requests can hit some slowness - e.g. I would expect there to be some limit on how many streams http2 implementations will allow simultaneously. And lastly, http2 is based on tcp so even if the prioritization is good, changing the priorities as the user scrolls means that the bytes currently transferring are likely less important and holding up the more important response - which is probably not a big deal on a good network but with any amount of packet loss will introduce lots of extra delay.

bsdetector 8y ago
Their own customers are using less than 15 GB per month, how much battery could they possibly save on the radio? A single video will use more radio time than days of image downloads in the browser. Furthermore, Google themselves didn't mention battery savings but just fewer bytes sent. And what delicious irony if they couldn't solve this with HTTP/2 because of servers not implementing the spec correctly or having weird undocumented quirks (their reason for not enabling pipelining despite it working just fine).
- mda 8y ago
  Who are their customers?
- dgoldstein0 8y ago
  My previous phone - an HTC one m7 - had some battery issues when it was pretty new. I limited myself to something like 2 or 3gb per month on cellular data (because that was my plan) and yet I still had to charge my phone at work somedays. (It's not about battery over the whole month - it's about the worst case on any given day.) I learned to debug by looking at the system data usage monitors - the standard power usage per app wasn't helpful. Turned out the problem was just a data hungry photo app we were developing at the time. We made it nicer on data usage before we launched. And after all that, chrome was usually in my top 3 apps for data usage. Probably still is. So they absolutely should be optimizing it. Granted that was several years ago but in some parts of the world that phone would probably be better then what the average consumer uses today.
- eh78ssxv2f 8y ago
  > Their own customers Can you explain what you mean? Chrome does not have any customers. > And what delicious irony if they couldn't solve this with HTTP/2 because of servers not implementing the spec correctly or having weird undocumented quirks (their reason for not enabling pipelining despite it working just fine). How do you envison the browser to solve this when the server is not H2 capable?

saagarjha 8y ago

> Most phone plans are unlimited or have data capable of watching movies. On Google's own Fi plan "less than 1% of individual Fi users ... use above 15 GB". I use Google Fi and I use less than one gigabyte a month: not because I'd like to, but because I don't want to pay for mobile data when I don't have to.

akie 8y ago

Wow, how can this conspiracy-theory-like nonsense be voted to the top of the comments? I thought Hacker News was a rational place. The reality is that lazy loading images really does help webpage performance, especially on mobile. You cannot properly implement it in the browser without additional information from the page developer - because you'll never know which images are so important that they will always need to be loaded, and which ones can be lazy loaded once they're almost in view. We're talking about the addition of one attribute to the <img> tag here. There's no conspiracy, and there's no ulterior motive.

bsdetector 8y ago
No we're talking about every website having to make this work because the default is to not require loading the resources or else be blamed for not being compliant with a spec forced on them by Google through their browser monopoly. Google should need some really good evidence to support this. What points do you disagree with, and why? Where are the metrics? If it's better performing than just priorities and flow control then by how much, and how do you justify breaking sites to achieve that margin?
- chronogram 8y ago
  Then just don’t specify the loading=lazy tag...
  - bzbarsky 8y ago
    Doesn't matter. The actual discussion on blink-dev is pretty clear about the plan being for lack of that attribute to mean "use some heuristics of Google's choice to decide whether to lazy-load".
simion314 8y ago
Do you like the fact that Google can now create standards ? They have an idea, put it in Chrome and then ask Mozilla to catch up and implement the missing tags.
sieabahlpark 8y ago

jasonvorhe 8y ago

> This is not hard to figure out - they are barely even trying to hide it. You meant to say that are aren't trying to hide it, right?

mda 8y ago

No, commodity phones in developing countries do not come with massive memories. Memory is the biggest issue for those. No, most phones do not have unlimited data at all. I am not even starting with your conspiracy theory. I am pretty sure when Chromium engineers look at same data for these decisions, but hey, maybe you have some numbers to share.

icebraining 8y ago

> Most phone plans are unlimited or have data capable of watching movies. On what do you base this claim? My experience is the opposite - most people I know have less than 3GB/month. Do you have any actual data?

lucb1e 8y ago
I agree with you, but the way I see GP's point is that people are not running out of data because of non lazy loaded images. If they were, they'd be complaining about how little they can browse or buying bigger subscriptions. It is also my experience that unlimited bundles (which aren't unlimited anyway, they're just limited to an amount that virtually nobody hits which is quite a difference from "we can make them use as much data as we want") are rare rather than the norm.