:hover is so slow on IE7

is there a way of speeding it up?

[londrum]

has anyone comes across this problem before...
i thought my pages were loading slow, but then i narrowed it down to IE7 and the way it deals with :hover.

if i have too many links on one page (over 100) then :hover slows down to a crawl... you have to wait around for at least a second or two before the :hover change takes affect.
normal links don't seem to be affected so much, just the ones where the background color changes, or a background image changes, or something like that.

needless to say, when you view the same page in other browsers like firefox then it is blindingly fast. and i've validated the code and css as well, so it's not that. it just seems to be IE7's lousy handling of :hover.

i googled it and it seems to be a known problem, but there aren't too many solutions.

unfortunately i'm stuck with a high number of links on the page, and can't reduce them down.

[swa66]

I'd try to not cause a redraw on :hover (hence specify no fonts, sizes, margins, etc. Just do colors, backgrounds)

[londrum]

good news is that i just installed IE8, and the problem seems to be fixed.
the :hovers run just as fast as all the other browsers.

thumbs up to to microsoft