In the last few days, Mozilla has closed a bug report on Bugzilla that calls for the addition of lazy loading support. Firefox 75 Nightly users can now toggle the feature which is disabled by default. It’s not clear if it will be enabled by the time Firefox 75 reaches the stable branch but according to comments on the Bugzilla thread, it’s in high demand.
Previously, websites could employ lazy loading by using JavaScript but now lazy loading syntax is supported directly in the web browser. The implementation in Firefox comes after Google added the feature to its browser. If you’re on the latest Nightly build of Firefox, you can enable the feature and test it out on a demo website made for that purpose. To enable the feature, follow these instructions:
- Go to about:config
- Search for ‘lazy’
- Now set dom.image-lazy-loading.enabled to true
- After relaunching the browser, head over to the test site to see lazy loading in action
In the last few days, WHATWG added the implementation to its spec, this will allow other browsers and website maintainers to implement the feature according to certain standards.
If you were wondering whether Neowin will be supporting lazy loading, we already do. The feature was implemented in the past week. The change should result in a faster experience for those of you using a compatible browser.