Posts for the 9th January 2004 (1 entry)

On a slow safari to Dunstan-ville

9th January 2004, late at night | Comments (4)

If you’re a Safari user and you find this site rather slow then these comments from Dave Hyatt might explain why:

In my earlier blog entry on caching problems, the issue of CSS being overly aggressive about fetching background-images was mentioned. I have fixed the issue now so that background images will only be fetched when first used. Sites like SprintPCS load much more quickly with this fix.

It seems that the browser downloads all the images specified in a style sheet, regardless of whether they’re actually being used on the page. Since my CSS contains a lot of un-used image links, users of Apple’s browser have been greeted with messages such as Fetching 1 of 84 images when they try to view this site.

Apparently the latest version of the browser (1.0) still exhibits this behaviour, but the next build should include the fix.