The web’s more media-heavy that it’s ever been, with a great many sites serving images like Sanitarium Up & Gos out of the back of a Black Thunder. This isn’t a problem until the image loading clogs up rendering of the rest of the page, causing your browsing experience to suffer. The good news is there’s a Chrome flag you can enable to alleviate this.
To enable the flag, you’ll have to hit up the following internal Chrome page (note the setting we’re going to enable is included as a fragment identifier):
chrome://flags/#enable-async-image-decoding
Called “AsyncImageDecoding”, the setting sticks image loading onto a worker thread, rather than the main one. This means the browser can continue doing its thing while all those JPEGs, PNGs and GIFs are rendered elsewhere.
Once they’re ready, they’ll be inserted into the page as normal.
You might not notice the difference for regular websites, but for the likes of Pinterest and Flickr, it can be a night-and-day improvement. Of course, depending on your setup, you mileage may vary!
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