How many mobile users have images turned off?

With mobile data plans, would a lot of users have their images turned off during browsing?

Especially poorer users, like college students would have their images turned off.

I am wondering in my webpage ,whether I should have a fallback for when images are turned off.

Does anyone know of the percentage of mobile users with images turned off?

 

I'm pretty sure that almost no one turns their images off in their mobile browsers. Those who are looking to get some more bang for their buck, probably just use browsers that use compression (Chrome has a feature like that on mobile devices, also most 'mini' versions of the other browsers)..

 

Depends. In western countries, probably not that many - in poorer parts of the world, I'm guessing it's far more probable to utilize bandwidth-saving techniques. So it would probably depend on your market.

In my country, I doubt you'll find anyone turning off images or javascript (except from a sequrity point) on their mobile / tablets. Most people don't care about data-usage, as it's usually "free" (included in the subscription) - most mobile subscriptions here in Norway have free calls, text and data (up to a given point, where you can still access the Internet, but at reduced speed).

 

I turn both off quite often, particularly on fat bloated sites -- EVEN on desktop. It's really not that uncommon if you are ANYPLACE that has metered or bandwidth capped connections, just ask our friends in Canada, Australia and New Zealand about that.

IF everyone lived in the perfect world of endless fiber like Korea, Taiwan and some parts of Europe then the question would be irrelevant, but when you still have massive swaths of North America where your choice is 33.6 dialup or a $200 a month satellite plan that only has 14.k upstream speeds despite the alleged 3 or 5mbps down, it's a legitimate concern.

There's a reason we've been told for over a decade to code semantic markup with progressive enhancement and a images-off fallback solution -- AND IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT BANDWIDTH!!!

Search engines don't have eyeballs, and not everyone browses the web with a screen. NEVER forget the accessibility aspect of that and why "graceful degradation" is so important.

Likewise don't let the LAME EXCUSE of "oh only so many people would be alienated by this" let you limit your "target audience". This is the Internet, the only thing you can predict about who will visit your website is that you cannot predict who will visit your website, much less what level of hardware or accessibility needs they will have!

Again, lame excuses, specifically the "Target audience" and "statistics" delusions
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200704/lame_excuses_for_not_being_a_web_professional/

Statistics in particular "oh, only two or three visitors come with scripting disabled" -- is that because there are only that many users, or that users that need that aren't going to your site as it's not friendly to them?

There's a group I call "percenters" -- they use percents as said lame excuse to justify their claims of "why bother"... Oh Opera is only 3%, legacy Opera is less than that, IE percentage is in decline, people using JAWS or other screen readers is half a percent, mobile is only a small percent and "not part of my audience" and so forth...

Until they've alienated so many tiny little groups their website is shit and they've alienated EVERY potential visitor. You end up with twenty groups that are 5%, if there's no overlap then that's EVERYONE.

It's also common to say percent without asking "of what" -- see the lie that is market share. People think that just because IE has dropped from 92% share to 25% they've lost users... when they had the market cornered there were only around 500 million internet users. Now that they're a quarter of the market said market consists of six times as many users... meaning they've GAINED users despite their "loss" in share -- meaning they haven't actually lost a blasted thing.

Don't let "percents" be used to justify lazy practices and not bothering to develop your website properly!

 

While I do agree with @deathshadow that you should code "the right way" - sometimes your market actually makes a bit of a difference. For one, if I'm making a Norwegian-based website which caters to Norwegian customers, in Norwegian, and doesn't even offer shipping abroad, I'm not gonna bother including (or considering) people on dial-up in the middle of nowhere, USA. I'll consider my core market, which is users in most cities in Norway, as those are our customers. That doesn't mean I should ditch any good coding practice, but if the website lands on 200 kB or 600 kB or even 1MB, it doesn't really matter - latency is probably not gonna be a real issue (again, talking about for Norwegian users), most users (not all, but most) have decent speeds, and in general, you can code so you cater specifically for mobile users (which of course might prefer a slightly less heavy site to load). Then again, if you're planning on expanding, creating an international site, catering for people all over the world, you'd be more concerned.

 

Semi-understandable, but you have to take into consideration that base connection speed is NOT the only determining factor. They might be on a crappy mobile data plan, they might be in a public place on a shared connection, they might have a torrent client running in the background while watching netflix on the same connection; or worse sharing a connection with anywhere from three to a dozen people all trying to use the high bandwidth high connection stuff at the same time. This causes the connection limit to plummet making things like "endless separate files for nothing" steaming piles of manure to those users.

It's why one of the things I advocate is to go down to the busiest fast food joint in town that has free wireless and test during lunch rush. Suddenly assumptions about speed and connections even in the best of places falls to shreds.

Honestly I've been hearing the lame excuses like "target audience", "service region" etc, etc, for some two decades, and it's just as big a load of bull as it was then.

This is the Internet, the only thing you can predict about who will visit your site is that you cannot predict who will visit your site.

 

I know six people right now who surf on their phones a lot - they have a monthly rate - and they never turn off images. That being said, I think you should absolutely have a back up plan if that's something you're able to do. Dont the alt descriptions show up when images are blocked? You know you should always use those anyway.. My mother turned off images on her phone. She always thought she was being hacked. So she turned off as much stuff as she could, but she did a lot of reading on her little phone.

 

BINGO - and it's not just ALT text; ALT is for IMG, a tag that should only be used on images that are actually content; sadly people throw the IMG tag at all sorts of crap they shouldn't and that has no business in the markup in the first place. Again, Markup is for content, it is NOT for presentation so if you have images that only really make sense for your screen layout, you don't put them in the HTML -- that's CSS' job.

Much less moving common presentational images into the CSS can let you leverage things like CSS sprites, reducing the number of separate files, reducing the number of handshakes and overall improving the speed. Quite often if the images have a like palette you can end up with a greatly reduced overall filesize as well.

See how most sites wasting megabytes of crap in dozens if not hundreds of files can usually be rewritten between 50 to 200k in a dozen files or less.

The tools exist, they're easy to use, people need to stop sleazing things out any old way and making up lame excuses for their basically ignoring why HTML even exists.