Question

Every responsive website development tutorial recommends using the display:none CSS property to hide content from loading on mobile browsers so the website loads faster. Is it true? Does display:none not load the images or does it still load the content on mobile browser? Is there any way to prevent loading unnecessary content on mobile browsers?

Answer 1

Browsers are getting smarter. Today your browser (depending on the version) might skip the image loading if it can determine it’s not useful.

The image has a display:none style but its size may be read by the script.
Chrome v68.0 does not load images if the parent is hidden.

You may check it there : http://jsfiddle.net/tnk3j08s/

You could also have checked it by looking at the "network" tab of your browser’s developer tools.

Note that if the browser is on a small CPU computer, not having to render the image (and layout the page) will make the whole rendering operation faster but I doubt this is something that really makes sense today.

If you want to prevent the image from loading you may simply not add the IMG element to your document (or set the IMG src attribute to "data:" or "about:blank").

"display: none" does not work if the image is on the first screen and not lazy loaded. The image will load but not display.