Can This Be Configured in IE?

[tedanderson]

Is there a way to configure Internet Explorer so that it does not show the web page until it is REALLY fully loaded?

One thing I notice about internet explorer (as well as a few other web browsers) is that whenever I go to a page on a high speed connection, the page will appear instantly, and the status bar at the lower left corner will say "Done" but the page will sit there "frozen" for about 10 to 15 seconds while it is continuing to load all of the other objects.

This can be somewhat aggravating to less-savy computer users because they can't scroll down, they can't click on anything, and they cant type anything into the text boxes. And it can be frustrating because there is no visual indication that the page is NOT ready to be utilized when they can clearly see all of the elements on it. So they attempt to click, scroll, type, etc... and then when the page finishes loading and it "catches up" it starts to execute all of those scroll and click commands causing everything to go seemingly out of control.

One thing that I can say about dial-up is that even though it is painstakingly SLOW according to today's standards, when you see the page, you know that it is ready to receieve commands. So is there a way to "fix" it or reconfigure IE so that the page does not lie to the user and say, "Done" while other elements are loading in?

I am sure that nobody really minds waiting the 10 to 15 seconds but many of my older and less-savy clients are always guessing as to whether the page is ready/fully loaded.

[kbob]

no not specifically-though you can make pages load faster by turning of a few things. Turn off dithering and auto image resizing-those are two of the biggest time killers. You might also save a bit of time by turning off the auto medium type settings...

but as for forcing the page not to load-I'm not aware off hand...

[tedanderson]

I'll try some of those things to see if it loads faster.

[Lucas]

You could make a custom browser is you really wanted to.

You can also set code in webpages to only show them when they are loaded, CMN did this for a while.

The best thing you can do in this situation, is to educate the users.

[boltd]

The main challenge is that web page loading is somewhat browser specific. One technique is to move to simpler markup by moving style information into CSS. The simpler markup is more efficient since it is smaller. I would suggest checking out books like Bulletproof Web Design (ISBN 0321346939) to hone your CSS skills. This might also give you some more control over the loading of images.

One limitation for media rich sites is the number of threads that a browser will use to download. A normal browser only uses two different threads to download content. So if you have an HTML page with 19 images the browser will load the HTML and the first image before it will load image 2 and 3, 4 and 5, and so on. One technique folks have used for this is to move their images to a sub-domain of the main domain site. So if you host your website on www.mychurch.org and your images on images.mychurch.org then the browser will move to using additional threads for the second host name. So some images would come up faster. Obviously you would have to create a lot of hostnames to make this really scale. This is the type of approach services like Flickr use.

Also, the use of Flash and JavaScript in the page will affect it's usability.