Re: Image loading policy

[Matthew Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

Dmitry M. Shatrov wrote:
>...
> I understand that people with broad and cheap Internet don't bother at
> all about image loading, but I also understand that the developers care
> about spreading epiphany over the world. And imagine that absence of a
> single simple option makes epiphany a non-browser at all for me and my
> neighbors - it simply doesn't work with our home internet channels.
> Personally I like epiphany a lot for its well-formed simplicity, but I
> wonder how do you consider image policy control unnecessary. It is a
> matter of a single checkbox and a lot of users (I'm not speaking about
> only myself saying "a lot", seriously).
>...

Unfortunately, there are many Web pages for which, in Gecko, you have to
load images to understand them. Sometimes this is because they do not
have proper alt= text. And sometimes, even if they do have proper alt=
text, they are written in such a way that they trigger Quirks Mode,
which means (among many other things) that the image placeholder is
drawn as a box the size of the unloaded graphic, which means the alt=
text isn't readable anyway.

Some of these pages are not idempotent -- loading such a page twice is
meaningfully different from loading it once. For example, my bank's
online banking has a graphical menu bar with decent alt= text, but it
triggers Quirks Mode, so the alt= text is unreadable and I need to see
the images in it. I can't turn images on in the prefs, and then reload
the page, because that might make two payments instead of one, or whatever.

Therefore, having the option not to load images is useful only if there
is also a function for loading the images in a page that is already
loaded, without reloading the whole page. Unfortunately, Gecko doesn't
let you do this. <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47475>
And the sort of people most likely to be able to contribute to Mozilla
(because they have a fast Internet connection) are the sort of people
least likely to be interested in implementing this function (because
they have a fast Internet connection).

That said, Safari has such a checkbox in its preferences for image
loading, without having the ability to load images in an already-loaded
page. I don't understand why -- maybe it means that everything I just
wrote is wrong. But I doubt it.

-- 
Matthew Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/