Chrome is testing a feature that will speed up your daily browsing

Chrome 148 is currently in development and is expected to be released in mid-April. When an update arrives, it might make your daily search a little faster. Google is testing lazy loading for video and audio elements (via PCWorld).

If you’re not familiar with lazy loading, it’s a feature that delays the loading of non-critical, off-screen resources until needed. The result is improved page load performance and reduced bandwidth. For example, imagine you visit a website with many images. Usually, all elements of the page need to be loaded in order to do your work. Lazy loading, on the other hand, delays loading images that aren’t in your immediate view until you scroll to them, allowing the page to load faster.

Chrome and Chromium-based browsers already have built-in lazy loading support, but only for images and iframes. This update will introduce support for lazy loading of video and audio elements. But don’t expect to see a difference with YouTube video placements; Lazy loading is already in effect for these videos as they are embedded using iframes.

According to the announcement, lazy loading will be enabled for all users. It will be available on desktop, Android and iOS. This feature is expected to be available in other Chromium browsers such as Edge and Vivaldi.

In related news, Google is also addressing a major concern Chrome’s split view feature. The fix will change the location of the option in the context menu and adjust the drag and drop thresholds to activate it.