firefox scroll lag
Here’s a tip for you web designers out there.
Some people have noticed that if you have a fixed background in a webpage, Firefox sometimes has real lag when you’re scrolling the page. It turns out the problem is related to the background images in the content area that’s being scrolled over the fixed background. If you’re drawing the background of the content area with a small pattern image that gets repeated many, many times (in my case, it was a 672×1 graphic that was repeated all the way down the page) then Firefox slows way down.
The solution: expand the pattern image to include more repetitions so that it’s a larger image that isn’t repeated as many times. In my case, I enlarged the 672×1 graphic to 672×400 and the lag vanished.
Interesting note: Old versions of Netscape (3.0 or 4.0, I can’t remember) used to take forever to draw a page if your background image was very small. If you used a 1×1 image, you could actually see the pixels being drawn one by one. The solution was to use larger ‘chunks’ so that there were not as many repetions. It would seem like this problem didn’t go away completely!