I have IE7 and Mozilla Firefox. When I use the WoW CSS layout, it loads perfectly fine for Mozilla. When I open the guild website in IE7, the page becomes so lagged up and choppy that I can't even move the scrollbar. It's weird. It takes the page a good 10-15 seconds to display everything. The graphics are loading though and the page looks good... I just can't scroll down or up the page without the website acting like I have my CPU load is 100%, when it isn't. Please check on this for me.

I admit it's slower on my laptop as well, but not unusuably slow. How fast is your machine?

My initial guess is this, though. IE7's transparent PNG support is new, and it's probably not terribly fast, while Firefox (And pretty much every other browser) has supported Alpha-channel transparent PNGs properly for years, and it probably much more efficient.

This can probably be tested pretty efficiently by loading up the same layout in IE6 (which doesn't support Transparent PNGs) and see if it's slow there as well. My guess is it won't....I'm actually going to try that right now, out of curiosity.

It seems I was right about that. IE6 renders the page very quickly without any kind of hiccup (on a slower machine). Scrolling is trivially fast on IE6.

My theory is this: IE7 is re-rendering the transparency with each bit of scrolling, while Firefox pre-renders is and then only has to scroll an image, rather than re-rending the page with the transparency each time.

I obviously don't have access to the IE7 code (nor would I take the time to try to read it if I did), but just based on what I see IE7 doing, it seems to be the case.

I'm running 3.2 Ghz Pentium D Dual Core with 1gb 3200 ddr. Runs great! I really love the layout, but I don't care for firefox's look and feel. Give me a minute or two and ill fraps it, and throw a video up on youtube for you to check out.

Ok, I don't mind downgrading a bit, but here's the video anyway since I took the time to upload it . I hope any future releases of layouts will support ie7 . Great work, and that layout is HOT!

the bottom line is that IE7 (and pretty much everything that MS does) sucks...

If i could i would have Linux (or Leopard) installed in my machine and never use MS again...too bad that i cant (cry).

But i bet that chops will find a way to go around it and make the template so everyone can use it as smooth as it's supposed to be used =D

btw, great job on everything related to dkpsystem chops. The new layouts are awesome (even tho i dont use any of them =P)

I hate to bump a 3-month-old thread, but is there any way to fix or otherwise work around this problem?

We're ready to move our guild over to the new site, but the Guild Leader is saying no until we get the choppiness fixed in IE7.

Help?

The solution is one of two options:

1) Use a different theme.

2) Modify the various images to be solid PNGs rather than transparent PNGs, then modify the paths (to point to the newly modified and uploaded images) in the CSS portions of the layout.

It's unfortunate these are the options, but until Microsoft optimizes it's partially transparent PNG implementation, these are your only two options.

Which themes suffer from the transparent PNG's you are referring to?

Primarily just the WoW.com theme.

I've posted a fix for this here:

http://www.dkpsystem.com/viewthread.php?threadid=6215

It needs to be looked at a little more by someone who has more knowledge about CSS/HTML, there does seem to be some minor weird layout problem, but seems to be working for me much faster.

I had this similar problem as well with my site and found that it was indeed IE7's ability to support transparent png, but maybe not the way you think. When I looked at menumid.png I noticed that it was only 1 pixel height. I saved this file, increased its height from 1 pixel to 20, saved it to my site and now my site loads just fine with IE7 and still retains the nice transparency.
http://www.esadguild.org

I've attached my menumid.png for your use.

I did some more work, and found that it's only the 'spacer.gif' that is causing the problem. In the wow.com IE template, the 1x1 image is menumid.png, if you replace that file with a 1x1 gif, everything is fine.

I uploaded this single image to my administrative uploader, and then changed the layout.html file so that it uses the menumid.gif file instead of the default menumid.png file.

It seems that the other other png's are used sparingly, or in a way that doesn't bother IE. The 1x1 png is used a lot and kills IE. Changing it to this 1x1 gif fixes all the layout problems, and doesn't bug IE out.

The moral of the story is that IE7 doesn't render a repeating 1x1 transparent PNG very quickly, which was the root of the problems with the WoW template all along.

Thanks for looking into this so deeply. I'll be replacing it with the bigger transparent PNG file in the template. I honestly had no idea the 1x1 was the problem.