Reply To: Hiding on mobile – bad practice?

[Shikkediel]

A small test I just did with Opera suggests that a background image from a hidden element will actually download but not if it’s the parent that’s hidden. So that part seems to have remained the same at least. I wouldn’t suspect many of the browser developers to have put in much effort into changing this behaviour since that blog was written…

codepen.io/jqLaQE

Just click to show the element (this will give some indication) – using F5 won’t work unfortunately but when clearing the browser cache, a repetitive test will show that the request for the url is not made in the “network” tab of dev tools.