Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

forgotmypw17

Lazy loading breaks a lot of functionality.

For example, I open a webpage and then go offline. Later, I scroll down, but the content is missing.

Another time, I open a webpage and save it. But most of the content is not saved, because it has not been loaded.

The network activity is actually higher for a page with lazy-loading elements.

All-around, it does not make any sense to me, personally.

View on HN

Both of these seem like uncommon edge cases. I can't remember the last time I actually "saved a webpage" - I think in my using the web for nearly the past 30 years that functionality hardly ever worked well in the first place. I do use print-to-PDF fairly often, but honestly don't know how lazy load works in that scenario. If you choose to print all pages and it doesn't include lazy loaded images, I'd just consider that a bug.

For you, they are uncommon edge cases. For me, they are everyday usage.

The problems lazy loading solves is an everyday issue for me. So ...

I guess the lack of user control here is the annoying part. Hopefully in the next round of standards updates this makes it in.

I mean it wouldn't be hard to run a simple user script to add or remove all lazy attributes, though this isn't a solution for everyone, but most people don't care either.

Given how much link rot there is I would have wanted all my non-porn non-bank website visits to be saved to some encrypted folder, in some way.

Especially since Google got so bad you can't refind webpages you know exist.

I wish browsers did this automatically so that the back button works properly instead of being just a guess on whether you pressed it or not.

I wish the back button would bring back the rendered view of a page from a cache so that it would be (a) instant, and (b) not make any network requests.

It seemed to me that older versions of the Opera browser did this, and the text-based "links" browser seems to do this today.

I'm confused - my browser does exactly that, and so do others' around me.

I've even had an issue on a project recently caused exactly by the rendered view being saved for the back button. I've also had to demonstrate a possible issue with full page loaders on a regular website twice for the same back button reason - because apparently people (or at least several of my colleagues) don't find browsers' native request loading indication enough anymore... Rotten by JS loaders and SPA's, I guess?

It feels like this is something the browser can solve by working towards these edge cases as bugs to fix. Especially saving the webpage with lazy loading. I've encountered similar issues when using iOS Share menu to convert a webpage to a PDF or Reader PDF, where sometimes you have to scroll the webpage first before it exports correctly. These are bugs that web browsers need to fix. Similarly, there should be some kind of warning or progress bar if you have downloads in progress but want to go to airplane mode. It could be optional, but like when you close your browser and downloads are still running, it could ask if you want to go offline after downloads finish, for example.

> I open a webpage and then go offline. Later, I scroll down, but the content is missing.

This bites me often, too. It's always infuriating.

could hold down the space bar until you are at the end, then save.

That is a great idea, but actually does not work, because the browser redownloads the page from scratch when I save. Also, it has to be done for every page, which I would have to remember to do each time.

ah right! I forgot about that. For a single page:

(Firefox) load everything > ctrl+a > right click > view source (have to wait a bit for that to work) > ctrl+a again > copy > paste into text document > save as > example.html

It is a truly insane workflow, as if you are trying to do something weird.

Better to just right click > take screenshot > whole page or use the cli https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/taking...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com