Background Rendering Slow in FireFox

[raf311]

It seems that FireFox has problems rendering a background div on my site. It's like it wants to display the content before the background. It works fine in IE. It also appears that slower connections, dynamic content or longer pages are more of a problem.

Any ideas or possible solutions?

Thanks!

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[edited by: tedster at 8:16 pm (utc) on Dec. 22, 2006]

[cmarshall]

That's just plain life.

This is that whole structure/presentation split thing. If you use background-color, as opposed to background-image, it will be faster.

The idea is that your structure is perfectly formed quickly. The layout is fine, and the images are "eye candy," so they are given lowest priority. They also tend to be the biggest part of the page download, so the quick, important stuff is drawn first, followed by the expensive eye candy.

I use background-image extensively in my sites. It allows me to do massive customization of my sites by simply switching CSS files, but the price is slow rendering. preloading images may help a bit for slower connections.