Google Chrome Testing 'Lazy Loading' Feature For Faster Page Loads

With the Internet becoming a mainstream form of content consumption, website and browser makers both are trying to make the experience as effortless as possible. Google Chrome, in particular, has been pushing hard to speed up load times, and Google even claims that it has managed to load pages 10 to 20 times faster on average than last year. Furthering this effort, a feature called 'lazy loading' made for Chrome on Android, has now been implemented in the Canary channels of Chrome for desktop as well. It essentially tries to speed up the loading process by just loading a part of the page that is in view.

What 'lazy loading' does is that it only loads the page in view, and then later loads the rest as you scroll down. This feature could prove to be beneficial for heavy duty websites with big graphics that take a while to load, even in a fast data connection. It could help in saving precious data as well, apart from loading pages faster. Essentially, images and frames that aren't visible to you are not loaded till they are visible. So once you start scrolling down, the rest of the page in view will load at that time.

To use lazy loading, users will need to activate two flags in the Chrome Canary channel - chrome://flags/#enable-lazy-image-loading, and chrome://flags/#enable-lazy-frame-loading, reports Bleeping Computer. In Google tests, the report states that page load improvements were 18 to 35 percent than before, depending on the network configuration and Internet connection.

This new feature was specifically made for Android users to save precious data on mobile and increase page load speeds. Now, after successful testing, this feature has been implemented in the Chrome Canary desktop channel as well.