You may have noticed that some web pages appear sluggish, especially those filled with video and audio clips. A lot of this depends on how browsers load things. Right now, Chrome loads everything on a page at once, whether you’re going to scroll down to it or not. He is changing. Google is testing Chrome 148 features Chrome lazy loading for video and audio elements, and this can make a real difference on media-heavy sites.
The idea behind Chrome’s lazy loading is simple. Instead of fetching each video and audio file as soon as the page opens, Chrome will wait until you scroll closer to them before loading them. Images have worked this way in Chrome since 2019, but videos and audio never got the same treatment. Chrome 148 bridges that gap. This feature will be on by default for all users on desktop, Android, and iOS, so there’s nothing to configure. Chrome 148 is currently in development and is expected to launch in mid-April.
What does this really mean for browsing
The practical benefit is that pages appear more usable quickly. Right now, Chrome can’t mark a page as fully loaded unless it contains video content that you can never even scroll through. Remove that, and the browser will stop wasting time and data on media sitting at the bottom of the page.
It’s worth noting that YouTube embeds will not be affected here. They’re already loaded lazily because they use iframes, which is how Chrome has handled it for years. This update targets video and audio elements that exist directly in the page’s code, which is common on news sites, blogs, and media-heavy articles.
This change also applies to other Chromium-based browsers. Edge, Vivaldi and Brave will all pick it up automatically as they share the same underlying engine. As we noted when Google claimed Chrome on Android was the fastest mobile browser, Google has been pushing Chrome performance quite aggressively recently, and this fits the same pattern. This follows a series of recent Chrome updates that have steadily added quality of life improvements to the browser.
One thing to keep in mind: This only helps on pages where developers add the necessary code to enable it. Chrome won’t retroactively enforce lazy loading across the entire web. Sites that haven’t adopted it won’t feel any different. But for pages that support it, the improvement should be noticeable.
