Sorry for the long title but I couldn't think of any other way of describing it. I'm working on a new layout for my site and it works fine in Firefox but in Internet Explorer the page's background loads and says "Done", then about 5 - 8 seconds later the pages content all appears at once. Give it a try for yourself:

http://finalfantasy-xiii.net/test/index3.php

Can anyone tell me why it could be doing this and how I could get it to load normally?

Thanks!

For one, your background image is enormous.
However, the biggest problem, and the reason for that behavior is that you've got the entire site in tables. Tables load exactly as you describe - so dump the tables for layout

Ahhh thanks alot :P I hate relying on tables for layouts but it's soo easy. I guess I'll learn to do it the Tableless way. Thanks again!

on a side note, I am so ready for Final Fantasy XIII

On an side not more: The page load event fires even if the images loaded via CSS are not finished.

Explanations:
I run a service oriented web site, http://web-screenshot that take real time screenshots of web pages.
For starting the screenshot procedure, I have developed a python program that wait for a "page loaded" event to start the screenshot capture.

What I have discovered though, via sites like myspace, is that the Gecko engine (the foundation of mozilla, firefox, thunderbird and the like) send an "page loaded" event even when an image is still loading from the CSS page.

They probably have separated them.
Add this to the fact that a browser open a limited number of concurrent conenctions to the same site, to not overload it (default for firefox is 4 connections per domains), it means that if you have a paeg that is graphic intensive, with load of external js and css files, you can have a page laoded event even when not every composant are loaded.

It depend of your page optimisations and structure.

maybe you should try to use a css layout, I mean using the copy merge to create low-size background images.

Originally Posted by seocd

on a side note, I am so ready for Final Fantasy XIII

If only they would come out with some information for it.

This is something I wouldn't normally do but I actually tried out a program that converts table layouts to tableless ones: http://www.table2css.com/

It works surprisingly well O_O everything on my layout is working as it's supposed to except for the collapsable div which I'm getting help with on their forums. It's good for lazy people. Here's my layout in tableless form but with some features disabled while I work on it: http://finalfantasy-xiii.net/test/index.html

Right now I'm gonna take everyones advice and try to size down my background image. Thanks!