Getting "primitive" version of a page momentarily before the normal page loads?

[woo me with science]

I am not sure how to explain this, but I have been getting a "bare bones" version of a page momentarily before the full page loads. In other words, the content of the page is there, but it is on a white background with what seems to be plain text instead of all the fancy pictures and visual effects. For example, :rofl: will show as ;rofl; (using colons instead of semicolons) - in other words, the printed symbol for the emoticon instead of the emoticon.

Anyone know why this might be happening?

Thanks.

[struggle4progress]

1. This happens to me sometimes. I assume that rendering a webpage in final form

is a multistep process, depending on how the page is coded, what extra material requires look-up, browser details, operating system details ...

Various processes might time-out, depending on the current speed of your connection, whether the server hosting the webpage is overloaded ...

Your browser or network connection has to decide how to handle time-outs: does it just give up and render the page? does it begin rendering the page and resubmit some requests? ...

[woo me with science]

2. I'm not sure. It hasn't happened very often until recently.

It doesn't feel like a time out, if I understand that term. It all happens pretty quickly.

The Decorah Eagles webcam page turned that way suddenly a few weeks ago after having worked perfectly before. It was not temporary - I had to find another site that was hosting the webcam.

Now it's just happening very briefly sometimes on various websites before the final page loads.

[woo me with science]

3. Okay, that's weird.

Right after I posted that, I signed off for a minute and used a drive cleaner. Since I came back to DU and signed in again, the maroon colored bar is no longer on any of the DU pages. The site is full-featured (e.g., I see emoticons as emoticons), but the colors are different. I don't remember putting maroon there, so I always assumed it was the default...but it's gone now. The colors look like the DU3 preview.

I have no idea what happened.

[ChromeFoundry]

4. Try disabling all add-ons

and see if the page loads quicker.

Things like Firebug, Adblock, GreeseMonkey and Script-Blockers can cause for added slowness in the full rendering of the page.
Enable add-ons one at a time to determine the culprit.

It appears that your browser is rendering the page through a lot of different layers of add-on applications. Each image is loaded through an individual connect/request to the hosting server. There is a limit on how many connections your browser will establish in parallel as it renders your page. Make sure your browser is caching images, or it will need to download images on every page load. When images are cached, they are available to the rendered page much faster than having to download from the server.

Make sure your anti-virus/malware engine and definitions are up to date.

[woo me with science]

5. Thanks. I will try this.

How do I make sure my browser is caching images?

[pokerfan]

6. css loading slowly?

When the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets">css is a separate file you will sometimes see this. The bare html codes gets loaded before the style sheet for whatever reason.

[woo me with science]

7. Thanks, pokerfan.

That makes sense.