back to article If a picture tells a 1000 words about latency, Google won't load it

Google's tweaked the Data Saver in the mobile version of its Chrome browser, making images an opt-in luxury for those on slow connections. “After the page has loaded, you can tap to show all images or just the individual ones you want, making the web faster and cheaper to access on slow connections,” Google says, claiming “up …

  1. the spectacularly refined chap

    Déjà vu

    So, they want brownie points for reintroducing a feature that was standard across the board in 1995?

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge
      Windows

      Re: Déjà vu

      Don't blame them for reinventing stuff from 20 years ago, they couldn't remember something from when they were less than five.

      Unfortunately a few weeks back Google said they were going to reinvent WAP. Those that don't remember history are condenemed to repeat it...

    2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Déjà vu

      TBH better to have control in the browser, which this kind of proxy setting does. Because "retina" websites are filling themselves with fooking huge images that generally get downloaded whatever the device.

  2. frank ly

    'Image Block' plugin for Firefox

    That works too.

  3. Shadow Systems

    Or do it yourself.

    Browser options, accessibility, & untick the auto-load images box.

    It still shows the placeholders where the image is supposed to be & activating the placeholder causes the image to load, but otherwise your browsing speeds up considerably when you're not forced to grab every damned web bug single pixel image, web beacon, or half gigabyte selfy bullshit barfed into your bandwidth.

    9 times out of 10 the dipshit that posted it didn't bother to include proper Alt Text (glares at you ElReg) so it means absolutely *bollocks* to anyone whom can't see the image for whatever reason.

    So just turn the images off in the options & get the same result as Google's self congratulatory wank fest.

    It's amazing how much faster pages load when you don't have to pull down a couple of megs worth of pics just to display ~5Kb worth of content.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Or do it yourself.

      Also, Tools > Page info > Permissions, allows you to block images at per-domain granularity.

    2. Gene Cash Silver badge

      Re: Or do it yourself.

      None of those settings options are available on Mobile Firefox, buckwheat... which is what this concerns since it's talking about conserving mobile data.

  4. Mark 85

    “After the page has loaded, you can tap to show all images or just the individual ones you want,

    How can you know which ones you want to see on a given webpage without seeing them? Something seems to be missing from this statement. I would think they'd at least show a thumbnail but the article and links don't mention that. Maybe the users are supposed to be psychic?

    1. AndrueC Silver badge
      Happy

      How can you know which ones you want to see on a given webpage without seeing them?

      If you won't know what a picture is likely to be then you probably don't need to see it :)

    2. andy1029384756

      Alt attributes. A bit of text describing the image, assuming of course the web developer bothered to use it. Most don't...

  5. Spoonguard
    Meh

    If my experiences with Opera Mini are to be believed, there are plenty of savings to be made by stripping out javascript cruft and other junk like webfonts as well. But that would block a lot of Advertising Analy tics as well...

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      So, all good then! ;-)

    2. Adam 1

      Even more savings to be had by blocking AdSense and Google analytics. Reckon that will make it in anytime soon?

  6. msknight

    Sits back with popcorn.

    Many adverts are image-ish based. This is going to put them directly in the line of fire of advertisers.

    1. Adam 1

      Re: Sits back with popcorn.

      It will force them to use text based ads more frequently. What a most unfortunate side effect that we most definitely did not foresee, Governor.

  7. Christian Berger

    So far you rarely wait for images

    Most of the wait for webpages to load is for DNS queries to go through because some idiot thought it would make sense to use some bloated Javascript from some other domain.

    1. DaLo

      Re: So far you rarely wait for images

      "...some idiot thought it would make sense to use some bloated Javascript from some other domain."

      Hmm, swings and roundabouts really. You load jquery, google analytics etc from a well known defined third party as many sites do and it gets cached under that domain so doesn't need to load on each site you go to, therefore overall it should speed up your browsing experience.

      As so many sites use jquery for instance, hosting them on each individual web server means your cache has hundreds of copies of exactly the same file, each having been downloaded individually. Also the standard per host connection limit that a browser may enforce (based on HTTP standards) can block further requests from downloading additional content, whereas serving some content from a different domain can allow it to be downloaded in parallel - especially if catered for to make sure it is downloaded non-blocking/synchronously.

      However the site owner is then putting their visitors at the mercy of a third party, with the risk of malware injections, dns timeouts, third party failure etc. But on average you would expect that a large third party cdn could deliver the scripts quicker than your site can and probably has better security engineers than you.

    2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: So far you rarely wait for images

      I don't see DNS queries as the real problem. And I've given up worrying about JS libraries: hopefully Houdini will allow things like JQuery to get slimmer over time but the important thing is people letting the browser decide how to do things and put load as much JS as possible after the onLoad() event.

      http/2 should bring significant improvements but as long as people insist on using multi MB big images for thumbnail previews then websites will continue to get slower.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Notspot

    For now, only subscribers in India and Indonesia … are getting this facility

    Can I have it in Wiltshire too, please?

  9. earl grey
    Trollface

    The sites i visit...i NEED to see the pictures

    Else, what's the point, eh?

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Coffee/keyboard

      Re: The sites i visit...i NEED to see the pictures

      Er, is that just coffee on your keyboard! ;-)

      1. Adam 1

        Re: The sites i visit...i NEED to see the pictures

        Going by his handle, surely it would be tea.

  10. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    Meanwhile in Germay

    You can now buy SIM cards with virtually unlimited traffic WhatsApp. TopUp requirements are minimal. No use to me as I don't use it but interesting all the same.

    Net neutrality: who needs it?

  11. Crazy Operations Guy

    "India can now access Internet.org's Free Basics un-metered subset of the web."

    So I'm guessing that you'd normally get just a bunch of local, mass-appeal type websites, but then have to subscribe to the 'Sports Package' to see football scores (subscribe soon to Sports Plus to get Cricket Scores and save up to 10% on your next bill!).

    It seems that Google's / Facebook's plan is to set a precedent for lack of net neutrality so that as high-speed connections are rolled-out, no one would notice until its far too late. Much like how the cable / DSL companies managed to get regional monopolies established in the US.

  12. Adam 1

    So what Google is arguing is that some traffic is more important than other traffic...

    /grabs popcorn

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