What?
The Intersection Observer API provides a way to asynchronously observe changes in the intersection of a target element with an ancestor element or with a top-level document's viewport.
Why?
It is a difficult task and low performance for detecting visibility of an element, or the relative visibility of two elements in relation to each other
Several use cases:
- Lazy-loading of images or other content as a page is scrolled.
- Implementing "Infinite scrolling".
- Deciding whether or not to perform tasks or animation processes based on whether or not the user will see the result.
How?


root
The element that is used as the viewport for checking visibility of the target. Must be the ancestor of the target. Defaults to the browser viewport if not specified or if
null
.rootMargin
Margin around the root. Can have values similar to the CSS
margin
property, e.g. "10px 20px 30px 40px"
(top, right, bottom, left). The values can be percentages. This set of values serves to grow or shrink each side of the root element's bounding box before computing intersections. Defaults to all zeros.threshold
Either a single number or an array of numbers which indicate at what percentage of the target's visibility the observer's callback should be executed. If you only want to detect when visibility passes the 50% mark, you can use a value of 0.5. If you want the callback to run every time visibility passes another 25%, you would specify the array [0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1]. The default is 0 (meaning as soon as even one pixel is visible, the callback will be run). A value of 1.0 means that the threshold isn't considered passed until every pixel is visible.
Notes
- Intersection Observer API is a new API so please add polyfill to make sure the app doesn't crash
- There are some the other cool APIs of observer pattern you can try: ResizeObserver, MutationObserver