In the Great Upcoming Queue Revolt of 2009, Neatorama reader Shon commented how Neatorama takes a long time to load. This was quite surprising to me, since we spent a lot of time, money, and effort to make Neatorama's front page - long and full of pictures as it is - loads fast. Well, as fast as it could if you're on broadband, that is (sorry, dial-uppers! No amount of optimization will overcome a slow connection).
So, I spent some time last night poking around, and sure enough: Neatorama's front page took its sweet-*ss time of 15 to 20 seconds to load on Internet Explorer 6.0 (the only IE copy I have on my computer). That ain't right - the front page content takes less than 2 to 3 seconds to load on Firefox. I think the difference is how Firefox renders the page as it downloads, versus IE displaying everything only after everything has been downloaded.
A while ago, we've moved calls to slow external ad servers to the end of the Neatorama page. This lets the content be displayed on Firefox browsers even before you see the rest of the page loads. It sure beats staring at a blank page on IE!
So, if you're that 1 in 3 Neatorama readers still using that slow-poke Internet Explorer, it's time to give Firefox a chance! Link
And I find that VERY impressive. I still use dialup, so that's REALLY something.
Neatorama! <3
I'm glad to see you advocating for Firefox. IE6 is the pits.
You might want to try installing the YSlow plugin for information on what could be slowing your pages down:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
Specifying a height for every img tag may help the page render more quickly. I'm curious if the JavaScript StumbleUpon and BuzzUp buttons could be causing any trouble?
I also kind of wonder if the 1,701 HTML errors (wow) could be slowing your page rendering down as the browser tries to make sense of your markup.
I'm also going to put up this post on my blog: mypetchimp.blogspot.com for memories!