410616 - "Show Picture" context menu item for images not currently loaded

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 218142

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[(no longer active)]

IE has had a feature for ages which is so useful to dialup users: it shows a "Show Picture" context menu item on images that are not yet loaded.  Several use cases come to mind:

a) The user is on a slow connection, and she attempts to load a page, which is timed out before being loaded completely.  The user wants to view a particular image, and refreshing the whole page takes a lot of time, so she right clicks on that picture, and selects Show Picture.  That image is loaded and displayed without touching the other parts of the page.

b) The user is on a slow connection, and is looking to only view certain pictures on a page.  She loads the page, waits enough for the page layout to be displayed so that she can correctly locate the desired image, and then cancels loading the rest of the page, right clicks on the image, and selects Show Picture.  The desired picture is loaded more quickly, because it's not necessary to wait for other content on the page to be loaded.

c) The user has disabled showing pictures for a website in order to make it load faster, but is intrigued about a particular image on a page of that website, so she right clicks on the image and chooses Show Picture.  That one picture is loaded and shown.  The current workaround is temporarily enabling pictures to be loaded on that website, reload the page, and wait for the whole content to be loaded, and then disabling pictures on that site again.

I think it's a nice to have feature, and shouldn't be too difficult to implement.  I'm eager to give it a shot, but I don't know where to start; so any hints are much appreciated.  :-)

Comment 1

[Mardeg]

This is implemented in an extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1672 which handles cases a, b, and c.
I have no view either way on whether it should be "built in" to Firefox.

Comment 2

[(no longer active)]

(In reply to comment #1)
> This is implemented in an extension -
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1672 which handles cases a, b,
> and c.
> I have no view either way on whether it should be "built in" to Firefox.

Great.  I'm willing to port the code in that extension to trunk if it's OK to include this in the mainstream Firefox code...

Comment 3

[Jo Hermans]

This is a dupe of bug 218142 - note that the 'show images' menu was one of the things that were in Mozilla/Netscape/Seamonkey, but stripped in Firefox in order to simplify the browser.

Comment 4

[(no longer active)]

Thanks for mentioning the dupe, Jo.