Menu slowness comes back. =(

Poster: glin
Dated: Friday September 17 2004 - 21:51:15 BST

Hi,

I just purchase a license for my site and I am now using the registered version with the milonic link remove from top of my website. But after removing the link, the menu becomes very slow again.

Can someone please shine some lights on this? Thanks.

My site:

The one without a link to milonic. On this page, the Milonic menu is very slow.
https://my.bugfamily.com/test2.html

The one with a link to milonic. Exactly same content except the link on the top. This menu is noticably faster than the one above.
https://my.bugfamily.com/test3.html

Thanks in advance.

-- Gary

Poster: Ruth
Dated: Saturday September 18 2004 - 4:33:25 BST

It takes just as long for the second link to load if you clear your cache. It does load quicker if you've gone to test2.html first since all the image files are then loaded in the browser cache. You have a lot of images that need to load. I don't really know if there's a fix for that.

Ruth

Poster: John
Dated: Saturday September 18 2004 - 5:18:14 BST

You might want to try http://www.milonic.com/preloadmenuimages.js.

Poster: glin
Dated: Saturday September 18 2004 - 6:10:30 BST

Thanks for the reply. But it still doesn't seem to solve the problem though. =(

Are there any other possibility that can cause the slowness of the menu?

The problematic page is:
https://my.bugfamily.com/test2.html

It seems that if I add some entity (like a link or img) before the first table in the HTML body, then the slowness problem dispears. So, I do not think the slowness is cause by image loading too slow. I wonder if there is some offending HTML tag that is causing this problem.

Thanks in advance for any suggestion.

-- Gary

Poster: glin
Dated: Saturday September 18 2004 - 6:27:17 BST

BTW, sorry if I was not clear in my question. The slowness is not in loading the page. It is the menu that takes a long time to popup.

After the page is loaded, if u click on one of the menu item (say App, for example), it takes a long time for the submenu to popup. It also takes a long time to switch from one menu to the other (for example: move the mouse cursor to App first, wait for the submenu to popup, then move to the mouse cusor to Hello).

-- Gary

Poster: John
Dated: Saturday September 18 2004 - 18:49:04 BST

Try moving all the menu calls and items to start as the first code after the body tag; i.e., get them all out of the head.

Poster: glin
Dated: Saturday September 18 2004 - 19:06:28 BST

I just did that. It still doesn't seem to help. =(


-- Gary

Poster: Ruth
Dated: Saturday September 18 2004 - 20:41:14 BST

I am not getting anything like you are describing on IE5.5 It's the page that takes forever to load [I'm on dial-up ] So, all I get is a dark blue until the images load and if I mouseover the menu immediately that I can see it, the subs drop right away.

I don't know if this makes a difference but, is there some reason that your menu data is all put in script tags on the page instead of in a menu_data.js file? You might check the directions for putting the menu in a table http://www.milonic.com/tablemenu.php Only the actual main menu is supposed to be in the table cell.


Ruth

Poster: glin
Dated: Saturday September 18 2004 - 23:54:23 BST

The reason that the menu is not in a js file is because the page generated from jsp page. I am using IE 6.0 on Windows XP (with the latest patches). I wonder the reason that you do not see the problem is because you are using a IE 5.5 browser? Can you try it with a IE 6.0 browser?

I have tried to access the page from various IE 6.0 browser (on other machines) and is able to see the noticable difference between test2.html and test3.html

-- Gary

Poster: Ruth
Dated: Sunday September 19 2004 - 1:32:16 BST

I don't know anything about jsp and unfortunately, as to IE I only have 5.5 available to me. FYI, with a cleared cache, both pages load the same and the menu works the same in both on IE5.5

Ruth

We've finally got a fix for slow menus in Internet Explorer

Poster: Andy
Dated: Sunday September 19 2004 - 12:36:05 BST

Hi All,

Just spent 2 hours debugging Gary's website to find out why the menus were running so slowly. This problem has been eluding me for quite some time and I'm happy to say that I've now found out what the problem is.

I'm so pleased that it isn't the menu at fault, it's a bug in Internet Explorer. it seems that Gary had built his website heavily based on tables. In fact the website's table levels do go quite deep and although this should be perfectly acceptable, Internet Explorer was choking on the large number of tables and table cell levels inside the HTML. This was causing the web page to use a large amount of processing power, thus slowing everything down to a crawl.

Anyway, the bug is due to tables being the first HTML object inside the body tag. Adding another HTML object cured the problem so Gary will need to add something in between the body tag and the first table tag as a workaround. This bug will need reporting to Microsoft so if anybody wants to take that job on it would be appreciated.

I've posted a copy of Gary's site to http://www.milonic.com/bugreports/ietablebug.htm and http://www.milonic.com/bugreports/ietablebugok.htm for reporting this bug. Gary - let me know if you'd rather us not use your code and I'll change it.

So in essence, the bug appears to be a problem in the way IE handles tables internally when no other HTML objects are included. It's very odd that nobody else has experienced this problem due to the vast number of Internet Explorer users in the World.

Hope this helps
Andy

Poster: John
Dated: Sunday September 19 2004 - 17:29:21 BST


Then if he moved the script tags to the first position after the body as I suggested, why did that not fix the problem?

Poster: Andy
Dated: Sunday September 19 2004 - 17:42:18 BST

Hi John,

You'd think it would wouldn't you, but it didn't.

My guess is that the JavaScript for the menu is being executed elsewhere within the rendering of the page, regardless of where it has been inserted. It would seem feasible that Internet Explorer would store the menu in memory even after the drawMenus() command has been executed and then dump it to the page at a more appropriate point. No idea why the browser would do this but as it's closed source we will probably never know.

I do know one similar thing that Internet Explorer does on these lines and that is if you put the menu code into the <HEAD> of a document, Internet Explorer WILL store in it in memory and automatically move it onto the body. When you look at the full output (HTML that includes the menu) with menus built in the head, the menu has been mysteriously moved to the body. I can see sense in this and I'm guessing the above is related to the same process but I'm only guessing here.

It's all getting a bit complicated now and my brain hurts.

Cheers
Andy

Poster: John
Dated: Sunday September 19 2004 - 20:46:16 BST

Friggin' idiots. Why can't they do things the "right" way?

Can't have that. Hit the sack. Big (long) day tomorrow...

Poster: Andy
Dated: Sunday September 19 2004 - 21:37:28 BST



Tell me about it - AND, we are both still working.

Still got emails to do, might have to tell people they are gonna have to wait till I get back if it gets too bad.

If it's not acceptable, TOUGH - cuz I REALLY need a break

See ya soon matey
Andy

Poster: John
Dated: Monday September 20 2004 - 1:09:27 BST


Lookin' forward to it!

Poster: glin
Dated: Tuesday September 21 2004 - 2:09:25 BST

Thanks Andy! You are the man!
I wouldn't be too surprise if this is just another "browser bug". I bet you guys must have been working around tons of bugs like these. Please do feel free to forward the HTML to MS.

Milonic is a really good product and especially it has a such good people behind it. Keep up the good works!

One last questios, if I want to put Milonic as one of my sponsors for my site, what logo I should use? I also like to put a brief description about what the company does and how it has help us to build our site/service. When I am done with the page, anyone I could contact to take a look at my sponsor page to ensure the accuracy of the description?

Thanks,
-- Gary

Poster: John
Dated: Tuesday September 21 2004 - 14:39:06 BST

Use any logo you like from http://www.milonic.com/logos.php. For checking, post a message to Andy in the Anything Goes section.

Thanks for your support.

Poster: checksum
Dated: Tuesday November 16 2004 - 12:02:33 GMT

I am having the exact same problem ( submenus shows up very slowly ). I have used version 3.3.19 and I did not see the problem, it started when I upgraded to version 5.5.

Poster: John
Dated: Tuesday November 16 2004 - 14:12:25 GMT

A URL, as requested, is really needed. You've given us nothing to go on...