Google is experimenting with an upcoming enhancement in Chrome 148 designed to improve everyday web navigation efficiency. Known as lazy loading, this capability offers significant performance gains beyond its straightforward name.
Typically, accessing a website requires the browser to fetch and render every component right away, including visuals, embedded media like videos and sounds, as well as interactive features pulled in through techniques such as AJAX. This comprehensive initial load often hampers overall site responsiveness.
Lazy loading addresses this by allowing the browser to delay the retrieval of specific items until they become relevant. For instance, rather than preloading every graphic, it can wait until the user scrolls toward a particular section to initiate the download.
Since 2019, Chrome and browsers built on Chromium have natively supported lazy loading for pictures and inline frames, but the update in version 148 will extend this functionality to cover video and audio components directly.
Keep in mind that embedded YouTube clips will not see improvements from this change, as they already utilize lazy loading through their iframe implementation. Direct video and audio tags, though less prevalent, still appear frequently across the web.
Beyond Chrome, this video and audio lazy loading support is slated for integration into additional Chromium-derived browsers, such as Microsoft Edge and Vivaldi.