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IE and Firefox feature request: download visible images first

April 12, 2005 2:09 PM

If you click on a photo caption my site brings you to photo album and jumps you to the image for that caption, scrolling the page to the right image if necessary. (Example)

The disappointing problem is that you can't see that particular image until Internet Explorer or Firefox download all images on the page that happen to be in the HTML before that image. This happens even though all of the images before the image you are trying to look at are off the screen. This means that you have to sit there and wait for all preceding images to load before you get to see the one right on your screen.

The fix seems simple: IE and Firefox should load images that are viewable to the user first, and then load off-screen images.

I can probably fix this via some fancy JavaScript, but it seems like more work than should be necessary.

Comments

This is obviously done for performance. Consider a large html document. The first part is , the HTML parser is going to kick off a thread to download that image while the main thread continues to download and parse the remaining content. It has no idea where your #link is in the document.

Good point Asher - thanks!

Hi, haven't posted long time :)

Well its not Java Script it's more of C++ or Visual Basic and OS mechanics, it has to check what pixels you're viewing and i can say that it's not an easy task.

First of all you need to have all images on html page with width and height variables set so the page viewer (IE or Firefox) will now the exact placement of the graphic elements, then you can check by the right scroll back wich elements you are viewing and decide then to load them first.

It's a great feature i can say, never thought of it, but i can recall many times when i was getting pissed about slow loading pages (mostly graphical) and when it all loaded the page was scrolling damn slow. I wonder if it will be implemented.

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