Hey I am just wondering is lazy loading dead or is there a reason why I am not seeing it alot on site currently? I am asking cause I have a client that really wants to use it for animation of content but not 100% sure if its worth doing. So I am hoping someone can give me a little insight on it.
Lazyloading isn't dead it's just not the only option out there for managing images.
Trust me you are seeing it, there are just updated ways to handle improved image loading. Twii for example (one of my projects) when you scroll loads images on demand, it also uses a internal image processor with cache so it will load dynamic the image based on the container size holding the image and if you are using a HIGH DPI display so the images are always the best fit down to the nearest 50px (rounded up).
Facebook, Instagram, and many others have some kind of image loading, the key is process when users are scrolling, and go 300+px below the fold so when the user gets to the image it is ready and done and they do not see it.
Facebook and Instagram actually send a smaller version of the image usually 30x30 version that is scaled up and blurred so the transition is softer and easer if the user sees the image before the full image is loaded.
Here is the blog post on Facebook about this system using GraphQL.
If it improved page load performance, then why wouldn't you do it? Make sure to test your sites on slower / limited types of hardware if you're using a beast of a machine for most of your work / recreation. That should go without saying, but recently there was an interesting Hacker News thread around a link to a blog post concerning why the web is so slow. Apparently not everyone agrees and experiences differ wildly.
I'm in the camp of having a feeling of slow load times, which could be for any number of reasons from connection strength to system limitations (new cheap chromebook). One of the most frustrating experiences is when I can't scroll a page due to loading, where it seems like I should be able to scroll the page. Not sure how much of that is one side or the other, and if it's on my end, I'm not sure how much of this could be helped by how the page's content loads, but half the time it seems like most of the content is there, yet the loading thing spinner is still going on my browser.
Another annoyance is scrolling down the page and then being thrown violently to the top of the page because something new loaded. I assume maybe this is a page reflow? Not sure. I'm still new to web development.
Just another bit in the byte
Andrew Wooldridge
eBay WebDev
No, you should use every trick in the book to make your site performant.