Lazy and Prompt

Chrome 148 shipped this week, and in the release notes you’ll find one of the best things to happen to web performance in a long time: loading="lazy" for <video> and <audio> elements. Scott Jehl, tech lead of Squarespace’s Performance & Accessibility team, has been the driving force behind this. Scott proposed the spec change, wrote the implementation, and got it through the WHATWG HTML spec process with positive signals from all three major browser engines. If you want to understand the full story behind it, Scott talked about it in detail on ShopTalk Show and Squarespace published an excellent post on how to use the feature today. This is what working with the web platform looks like: identify a real problem, propose a solution, build consensus, ship it. A good story. But that’s not the story of Chrome 148. The story of Chrome 148 is that Google – in the very same release – shipped the Prompt API, a feature that was met with explicit opposition from both…