bouncing images in safari loaded pages

[jkaz]

i have a problem with how safari loads webpages that have images on them.

a perfect example of this is to go to cnn.com and click on a story.

the first thing that comes up is the text, then an image off to the right of center,

then after a few moments of time in which to read some of the text,

more images load and push the main image to the middle of the page,

scrunching the text down and moving it around so that you no longer are
able to read without restarting to some extent.


For example, text that looked like this right away
when the page was loading

would like like this:


For example, text that looked
like this right away when the page
was loading

...

all happening in the blink of an eye.

it's like drip torture, after having experienced this
100's of times, it simply gives me headaches.


anyone know how to get better control
of how a page loads in safari?


THANKS!

 

[603]

anyone know how to get better control
of how a page loads in safari?THANKS!

i don't think there's any way to really tweak the load order of items on the page, but i might be able to explain what's causing the situation that you're describing.

if you've ever used Internet Explorer for Windows on a slow connection, you may have noticed that it will sometimes "lose" content. if you refresh the page, all the content is there. this is because Internet Explorer is aggressively attempting to render the page before all the content (text, images, Flash ads, etc) is cached locally. this is an exercise in getting the browser to render faster at the expense of the content. everything is fed into the cache and rendered quasi-simultaneously. if your net connection can't keep up, then stuff just gets cut off.

i'm not sure about the KHTML rendering engine that Safari is based on, but i do recall that the user-agent string for Safari says "Like Gecko" ( as stated here: http://homepage.mac.com/jprince/designSandbox/web/safari-agents/ ). that may not necessarily mean that KHTML and Gecko have anything in common... but Gecko browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, maybe others) actually download all the content, then render the page. this is at least a partial explanation for their perceived "slowness," when in fact the Gecko engine is not significantly faster or slower than IE from a computational standpoint.

to the viewer, though, the "cache, then render" method this is slower. the risk in that method, as you can see, is that people on dial-up (or on fast connections that are being used simultaneously by many people) will lose parts of pages because the rendering engine has already said "enough!" and stopped accepting content. if you reload the page, all the content is there - it was just downloaded after the rendering engine threw up its hands and painted the page into the window.

with this explanation in mind, you can hopefully see the difference in the two engines - really, a difference in two schools of thought regarding browsers - and understand why it would not be possible to tweak Safari in the manner you describe (AFAIK).

that being said, there are things you can do to speed up page rendering in general and prevent the "problem" - such as disabling Flash, blocking ad images with a custom CSS file, etc.

 

[jkaz]

thanks for the reply.

that explains alot.

wouldn't it be nice if there was an option for safari to completely download
a page, render it, then you can click a button that would slowly dissolve or fade it in?

i think so.

how bout setting up a proxie server, can i do that and would it help?

thanks!