Google Chrome’s development has been split into multiple channels so that new features can be developed and tested quickly and reliably before it’s decided whether or not they are to be released to the stable version. A new feature being tested in the latest Chrome Canary build is going to lead to significantly faster page load times. A feature commonly known as “lazy loading” is now being tested in Chrome Canary.
The lazy loading feature has been available in the Chrome Canary builds since version v70.0.3521.0. Those who are willing to try it out have to go to chrome://flags on Chrome Canary where they have to enable the chrome://flags/#enable-lazy-image-loading and chrome://flags/#enable-lazy-frame-loading flags.
This feature makes Chrome load only those elements on a page that are visible on the user’s screen. Images or elements that are below the fold, so to speak, are not loaded until the user scrolls down. This will lead to faster page load times as the browser isn’t required to load all of the page’s elements at once.
Google actually started testing it on Android after announcing the feature for Chrome back in January this year. Now that it’s testing this feature in the Canary builds of Chrome, the initial tests may have yielded positive results. It remains to be seen, though, when this feature will make it to the stable version of Chrome.
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