Flashing Pages in IE 6
Microsoft recently released Internet Explorer 6 and this really is the most capable browser I’ve seen. For the longest time I was loyal to Netscape, but IE 4 overtook, IE 5 kept innovating, and IE 6 is the best yet. I am a bit worried about all the MS specific stuff in there, but right now I’m welcoming the innovation.
The flash…
But, I’ve been having this annoying problem.
When a page loads, there’s a temporary white screen that flashes up for a split second just before the page loads. Looks quite jarring on many sites.
From what I can see this only ever
happens when the page is inside a
<frameset>. If there’s
lots and lots of JavaScript or CSS inline in
the <head> tag of the
page that is retrieved by the browser before
the <body> tag it can
cause this pause.
The fix…
First of all try extracting stuff into
external .js and
.css files. Ensure that all
links to these files
actually exist (the browser
may spend time looking for stuff that it
can’t find).
Finally, if the problem still occurs, try
moving the intensive JavaScript to after the
<body> tag. Be careful
that no events occur before the JS that they
rely on has been loaded.
Overall, get rid of the bloat incurred before the main body.