My wife and I both built our reunion websites on Internet Explorer, because we believed that most of our classmates probably used it for their browser. Over the last couple of days, we wanted to load the falling leaves, and we had to turn off our Instant Messaging to get it to load. Now, it is almost impossible to get the sites to load on Internet Explorer. It takes a very long time and even then the leaves hardly come down at all and the animation in the other gifs does not work well, if at all. My site works very well on Goggle Chrome, but I am sure most of our classes do not use other browsers. Any ideas for speeding this thing up on Windows Internet Explorer? Edd

Unfortunately no. I'd try turning off the falling leaves. Third party scripts like the falling leaves may seem like a minor addition, but when you add something like a large animation to an already complex home page which yours happens to be, you can start running into issues. Internet Explorer has never handled situations like this as well as other browsers such as Firefox. With a couple dozen objects and images on your home page and now the falling leaves the browser is just lagging. The leaves don't load anyway in IE and it's creating an ugly right scroll bar. For the usability of your site I'd remove.

In general: Third party objects and/or images on the home page should be kept in check. Too many and you start getting into computer performance issues and load time issues. Also some third party scripts may not be compatible, such as this one isn't with the Internet Explorer browser. There may be some other third party falling leaves script out there that works fine in Internet Explorer, but since this one doesn't you can almost bank on it causing additional problems as well.

Thanks Brad. I was afraid that total content might be the issue. Oh well, moving on...........Edd