Chrome is testing a new feature for speeding up browsing on even the heaviest pages

Chrome 148 is currently in development and is expected to roll out in mid-April. When the update arrives, it could make your daily browsing a little faster. Google is testing lazy loading for video and audio elements (via PCWorld).

If you’re unfamiliar with lazy loading, it’s a feature that delays the loading of non-critical, off-screen resources until they’re needed. The result is improved page load performance and reduced bandwidth usage. For example, say you navigated to a website with a bunch of images. Normally, all elements of the page would need to be loaded before you could go about your business. Lazy loading, on the other hand, defers loading images not in your immediate view until you scroll down 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 would introduce support for lazy loading of video and audio elements. But don’t expect to see a difference with YouTube video embeds; lazy loading is already in effect for these videos, since they’re 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 also expected to arrive on other Chromium browsers, such as Edge and Vivaldi.

In related news, Google is also fixing a major point of annoyance for Chrome’s split view feature. The fix will relocate the option in the context menu and adjust the drag-and-drop thresholds for triggering it.