Safari 3.0: Now keeps partially loaded pictures

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
November 8th, 2007 • 2:57 pm

As someone who is stuck with limited bandwidth, I am more than familiar with situations where web pages only get partially loaded, either because the browser loses the network connection due to time-out issues or because I manually interrupt the downloading process myself by clicking on the “Stop” button in order to save bandwidth.

Until now, however, there was one particularly frustrating aspect about Safari’s behaviour when the page loading process was interrupted. If the page in question contained pictures and Safari was still in the process of loading these pictures, but had already started to display the images partially, then interrupting the loading process would not only cause Safari to stop loading the rest of the images, but it would also cause it to remove the already loaded parts of the images from the rendered page and replace them with the small question-mark icon indicating a missing element in a page:

Question-mark icon

It was frustrating because, in most situations, part of an image is still better than no image at all (especially since Safari wouldn’t display the alt text either).

Well, I am pleased to report that in Safari 3.0 (part of Mac OS X 10.5), this behaviour has been fixed. Now, if you load a web page containing images and you click on the “Stop” button at a stage where Safari has already started to render some images in part, then these parts of the images remain visible even after clicking on the “Stop” button.

It is a small thing, and one that is probably unimportant to people with ample bandwidth, but it is a small thing that matters to me. So kudos to Apple for finally addressing this issue.


One Response to “Safari 3.0: Now keeps partially loaded pictures”

  1. Neil Anderson says:

    That is a good feature!

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