The downside of this is that it assumes that I am always online, and I can never know if a page has finished loading. Say I load an article in a background tab to read later, then go somewhere without WiFi like, say, an airplane. I read the first page, hit the space bar, and see gray boxes. Now I need to either scroll all the way through any article I want to read later (unless "infinite scroll" happens), or save it as a web archive (if that even still works).
Yeah and they are a pain in the ass. I hate this anti-feature and now it's becoming the standard. My only hope is that I will be able to turn it off with about:config flag or maybe set the proximity to the bottom of the screen higher, which I currently can't do because currently it's all custom JavaScript code.
And mobile browsers randomly purge and reload pages when they're low on memory, and news sites do lazy image loading with miscellaneous Javascript. It all sucks, and it's too bad that Google wants to (i.e. will) "make it official."
You think this sucks? So instead of optimizing for the 99% case where I go to a site and want to see the images on the page as fast as possible and defer loading what I can't see initially, you instead want to prioritize "Say I load an article in a background tab to read later, then go somewhere without WiFi like, say, an airplane."???
I agree, these websites already cause a new pattern of “quickly scroll to the bottom to make sure everything’s loaded”
I basically have to do this now before I board a train.
It’s good they’re implementing this, but it will mislead people to thinking the whole website is ready to use. It’s a shame an option couldn’t be “load the rest after page load”.
There is a Chrome optimization that already exists and has a similar downside: Taking away processing from unfocussed tabs. Example: Load Google play music. Switch to another tab while it loads. Switch back to music some time later. It only now actually starts loading. Quite annoying...
