On one hand true, on the other - it isn't that those fixes are some magic, extra smart hackery (at least on the idea level, dunno about the implementation). Don't load an image that user don't see, remove an image that user saw but don't see anymore - those seem as rather obvious solutions.
Just determining whether or not the user can see an image is quite tricky when you consider that there are a number of things which could cause it to be invisible to the user and thus safe to remove:
* It might be placed as a normal block element on the page but out of the current viewport.
* It might have had visibility: hidden CSS statement applied to it.
* It might have had display: none CSS statement applied to it.
* It might have the alpha channel set to fully transparent and then fade in.
* It might be inside a <div> that has overflow: scroll and then have that specific div scrolled such that the image is outside the viewport of that <div>
* It might be using top and left CSS properties to animate the position of the element such that it is off the screen.
* It might have it's CSS width or height set to 0 so that it can be start out "hidden" and then have animate open.
So I wouldn't discount this as just a simple solution because I see a lot of edge cases where things could get confusing just due to the complexity of how many ways there are for a page element to be visible versus not visible.
Except, selectively targeting (bad) cells in a heavily complex system (physiology) that you didn't design and have limited access to makes it tough.
Implementing these fixes in FF is easy. They didn't even have to be geniuses to realize it, just keeping an eye on friends (/rivals) would have given them the idea a few years ago.
NB: Not criticizing FF devs. They do awesome work! And sometimes, such silly little optimizations can just stay hidden at the back of everyone's minds for ages until showing themselves through a veil of obviousness.
right on. Please spend as much time reading the bug referenced above as you have this thread, and think about the obvious problems/hard solutions proposed, then make a better one! Just keeping a few million WinXP machines from a recycling barge in Bangladesh for another year would be worth the trouble. and hopefully smarter image handling by everybody's browser/phone/whatever will be a long term result.
Yeah the original comment isn't all that wrong technically (though not very nice either). Firefox is my main browser but loading long and heavy pages takes noticeably longer than with Chrome or IE and causes laggy scrolling. Glad they fixed it with v26 though, hopefully should land in the beta channel soon.
