IE cache settings can cause flickering

When image rollovers are constantly reloaded

[Hester]

I'm viewing a JavaScript drop-down menu on a site, that's causing IE6/XP to flicker when hovering over the images used for backgrounds. It's slowing the menu down a lot. I then saw that my Internet Settings were set to 'Check for newer versions of stored pages' on "Every visit to the page". Changing this to "Automatically" has cured the problem.

Does anyone know of a technique that stops the flickering when the user has "Every visit to the page" set?

[isitreal]

I believe that problem only occurs with background images, normally on things like image swapping the images are preloaded and kept in the browser image cache, in which case it's not a problem.

There were some claims that you can swap background images using a css trick, but the results are so truly awful on slower older computers running IE that you could never use that technique commercially.

The best solution of course is to just not use background images on drop menus, keep them clean and light, use CSS for all border/background styling and they'll work better anyway, load faster, etc..

[choster]

Instead of preloading arrays of images, David Shea has made the case at ALA to import a single large image and use CSS clipping and positioning selectively to hide and display the relevant blobs. It expands on a rollover method devised by Marek Blaha.

[alistapart.com...]
[pixy.cz...]

[isitreal]

That's exactly the method I was referring to, it doesn't work at all on older computers with Windows IE, it looks really bad, far far worse than using basic rollovers would, so unless you have a way to check for the processor speed of your visitor, or are absolutely positive that all your visitors will be using fast computers, this is a definite no go. The IE tweaks required severely cut down on the methods functionality, limiting it to only two positions, I would have to put this method on 'it would be nice if everyone ran nice new computers but they don't' pile.

What they call the IE 'flicker' problem isn't a mild 'flicker', it's a complete collapse of the navigation bar on slower pc's.

Test this stuff thoroughly before putting it out here as a real solution, I did, and it totally failed on slower pc's, it works really well on non IE browsers, and on fast pc's with IE.