Prevent Images From Loading

for the last day and a half i've been attempting to prevent images on a page from loading. i do this by calling a domready function. i just need this to work in firefox, so i'm using its DOMContentLoaded event. however, for troubleshooting purposes i have opted off the domready stuff and simply placed my code at the bottom of the html before the closing body tag, which does the same. my research shows that all the lazyloading techniques (which at the core are similar to what i'm doing; ie, preventing an image from loading) that do not rely on creating a custom attribute for the img tag, do not work. jquery's lazyloading plugin does not work: [URL] mootools' lazyloading plugin does not work: [URL]. however, they must have worked at one point. read the latest comments on lazyloading techniques online and you'll see that mostly everyone suddenly is unable to achieve lazyloading on their site. the only effect one achieves is that the image fades in when scrolling down, however it has already been downloaded when the page rendered, but it should only have been downloaded from the server once the scroll threshold for that image is hit.

calling a function to replace images with small placeholder images immediately after the dom loads (ie, before the full page loads) should work. this should prevent the loading of the original file in the src attribute, but it does not. i'm using firefox 3.6.3, but it happens on webkit browsers as well (though this is a documented bug); opera, however, works as it should. i did my research pretty thoroughly, but if i missed something