Images won't load until I scroll down the page
I'm having this problem constantly with shopping sites like aliexpress.com. Click on a number of pages to compare products and then when I open the tabs, I have to wait for each one to load the images because they've done something to keep the images from loading until you physically scroll down the page. I suppose it's similar to the image search on Google that won't load thumbnails till you scroll down. I've found obscure mentions about using userscripts to make this stop but have no idea how to do that. I HAVE used an add-on called Stylish in the past to fix some of Ebay's problems but with ready to use web downloaded scripts. I know these sites are delaying the image loads somewhere in the page code but is there anyone who could explain for a simple user how to shut it off? This is a link to a sample on aliexpress.com:
All Replies (5)
This may be due to a slow connection, however you can check the speed of your internet connection with this online tool:Speedtest
The example url at the bottom of the page does take a while to load as well. This will have to do with the size of the images, and the browser resizing.
There are are also default features in the about:config page that have default icon sizes. You can look at them in the about:config page and search for image.
When you scroll down, is the page still loading? Quick fixes if your Firefox slows down
The Network tab in the Web Console (Firefox/Tools > Web Developer) shoes 73 requests 716 KB for loaded images.
When I scroll down then this increases to 177 requests and 13,933.94 KB, so over 13 MB extra image data got loaded.
Guigs2, it has nothing to do with connection speed. Aliexpress and a few others run some kind of code in their web pages that blocks sending images until you actually scroll down the page. Try the link I pasted in the question and you'll see what I mean. When you're shopping through 20 or 30 different sellers, it's maddening to stop and wait over and over for the rest of the page to load. I'd say that Aliexpress does this on the majority of their pages and it's definitely deliberate. I've see it other places too - always where the pages are image heavy.
Cor-el, this is what I'm talking about. That particular page was a good example of the problem and they do that on the majority of their sale pages. I found one mention of this problem elsewhere on the forums here but can't find it again now that I want it. The only information given was that perhaps the poster could fix it with "a script" but I'm afraid that kind of thing is far beyond my skill level.
Google searching shows methods for ways to delay the images. One of them is called "lazyload" and I'd dearly love to find the person who promoted this and slap some sense into them.
Agreed, its a aweful idea, it actually adds load to servers, adds extra http connections and other bad things. e.g. a page with say 20 images might load them all, via 2-3 connecitons using keepalive in 2-3 seconds, at that point its all loaded and in the browser cache. No slowdowns when scrolling as it doesnt need to process anything or load anything, if you go offline the page is viewable as its already loaded. However this new silly trend to only load images when scrolling means either connections will be left held open "just incase you scroll" or open a fresh every time you scroll to load new images, this behaviour is on now many mainstream sites, ebay, google (including youtube), flickr, netflix and more. The fact they all doing the same thing suggests everyone is copying each other or there is one guy behind it all who has a lot of influence. Even worse some sites take it one step further and will continiously load new content extending the page as you scroll down e.g on ebay if you scroll down, you can do so forever, it keeps forever loading new items for sale, I have never been able to reach the bottom, it just loads and loads. No more is a page 2,3,4 etc. is just one page without a bottom. Same with things like youtube comments, all on one page with just continious scrolling, which means e.g. you cant skip to middle of comments, as is no way to do so, you simply have to keep scrolling until you get there, a far inferior system. Looking at many major websites new and old, the trend seems to be to make tall narrow sites that have big font sizes and lots of images, meaning lots of scrolling, they designed for tall narrow screens, what does that remind you off? smartphones. To verify this I made a post on WHT where some web developers hang out and asked whats with all these new silly trends on websites and someone quickly told me that yes its down to touch devices, they are now the design focus of websites. Even tho is still 100s of millions using desktop's they are usually treated as 2nd class when it comes to website development. For whatever reason loading all the images at once on a mobile device doesnt work that well and given the new trend to have pages scrolling forever or at least for a while, this is what they have come up with. I imagine any script or browser overide to disable such behaviour would simply break sites, as they have been hardcoded to function that way. As pointed out e.g. disabling javascript can cause images to never load at all rather than load when scrolling. This new trend has also caused runaway cpu usage on browsers, I see iton IE and firefox. If a wbepage loads images when scrolling it must mean its hooked to cpu cycles to detect end user activity, as it has to know when you scroll somehow, enough of these pages loaded at once in different tabs and cpu usage builds up. Things were better when there was one website for mobile and another for desktop, but developers are lazy now they will only do one for all.
p.s. sorry for the formatting of this post, I did break it up into paragraphs etc. but when posted its all just one cluster of text.
Endret
I know they didn't do it because of people with slow connections. I should be able to just open all the possible choices in tabs and then move back and forth as I quickly narrow down the choices - but with this delayed loading, what should take a few moments can waste upwards of 10 minutes or more - meaning I just get frustrated and buy somewhere else.
There HAS to have been some discussion on this on the Firefox forums before. I found it once but now can't under any search terms. It's like they've removed the whole topic from view.