My blog scrolls slowly in Gecko, the Mozilla rendering engine. What's more, the blog scrolls extremely slowly in Gecko on Linux. This is because of the fancy semi-transparent background used on each blog entry, to make the background of the page (with the birds) appear brighter on the entries. Internet Explorer doesn't support alpha transparency in the first place, so it's not really an issue there.
Anyway, it turns out that Gecko should be able to perform a little faster if it were tweaked. In fact, Gecko hacker Boris Zbarsky just filed a bug report about this. Let's hope it's possible to speed up the performance!
Posted by djst at May 10, 2004 9:18 PM“Internet Explorer doesn’t support alpha transparency in the first place, so it’s not really an issue there.”
IE does actually have support for alpha transparency via the (obviously proprietary) filter property for CSS.
Tutorial: http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/filter/filters.asp
Reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/filter/reference/filters/alpha.asp
Posted by: Minh Nguyễn at May 10, 2004 11:05 PM…not that I really advocate its use.
Posted by: Minh Nguyễn at May 10, 2004 11:06 PMIt's funny...I noticed this the first time I visited your site, and assumed it was due to the transparencies. It's always bugged me...but I liked reading your blog. So, I just used your syndication feed in my aggregator instead of visiting :-)
Posted by: Some lurker at May 10, 2004 11:47 PMDave,
I think your site is slow to scroll because it loads a 2000px x 2000px background image as the background for each blog entry. You might be better off making it a 1x1 png and letting it repeat. Same color/alpha value. There's no reason to use a 20kb file when a much much smaller file would do the trick. It would look exactly the same. Nice effect though.
Eli
Posted by: Eli at May 12, 2004 9:44 PMEli, unfortunately it would not look exactly the same with a 1x1 pixel graphic. This is because I'm using -moz-border-radius on the border of the blog entries. For some reason, the background image is painted outside of the border radius in Gecko. This means that even if I use a 10px rounded border edge, the background color will stil be filled as a square.
Posted by: David Tenser at May 13, 2004 2:58 AMIt's even slower with Opera 7.50. When using the mouse wheel it takes about one second for every scroll step on an Athlon 1800 XP+.
Stefan
Posted by: Stefan Borggraefe at May 14, 2004 8:08 AM-(Dave,
I think your site is slow to scroll because it loads a 2000px x 2000px background image as the background for each blog entry. You might be better off making it a 1x1 png and letting it repeat. Same color/alpha value. There's no reason to use a 20kb file when a much much smaller file would do the trick. It would look exactly the same. Nice effect though.
)
-Why?
Posted by: andry at July 1, 2004 11:09 PM