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Die, Hourglass on Rollovers

I've encountered yet another problem on my latest client's web site: http://dev.scrapsquilt.com/

Check out the navigation on the left. Mouse over the navigation on the left, and watch the text switch from brown to blue - and do this fast. All is peachy with that part. The problem is, on my boss's computer, in IE6 the cursor flickers from hand to arrow with hourglass, and then there is an occasional latency on the text switching colors.

Then check out http://www.fastcompany.com/homepage/index.html and do the same with the navigation tabs. My boss is annoyed with the hourglass showing up (not the flickering from hand to arrow - that can be fixed) and latency.

What we have found is that in Firefox, there are never any problems. In IE6 there is a flickering from hand to arrow on some computers, and hand to arrow with hourglass on others. What could be causing the hourglass to show up?

Here is my stylesheet: http://dev.scrapsquilt.com/style.css
and here is the method it, and the FastCompany's site, was based off of: http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2003/09/30/accessible_imagetab_rollovers.html

This is kind of a strange question so I can elaborate on it if necessary. Thanks again; hopefully this is the last problem I encounter with this client.

edit: He wanted me to add that the hourglass was associated with a spike in CPU usage, and that the rollover process was "jumpy" and "not seamless".

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Last edited by eljaysun, March 8th, 2006 05:26 AM (Edited 2 times)

Sorry for the monologue, but after a lot of troubleshooting, we think that it might have something to do with the Google Toolbar.

On my boss's computer and his daughters computer we saw the hourglass - they both had Google Toolbar installed. On my computer and my co-worker's computer we did not see the hourglass, and we did not have the Google Toolbar.

Then, I installed the Google Toolbar on my computer and I saw the hourglass; he unistalled the Google Toolbar and did not se the hourglass. Pretty convincing to me. So my new question is: Do you think the Google Toolbar is responsible for this problem? And if so, why might this be?

Another thing we've found out about in the past hour or so is this method: http://www.wizardworks.ca/articles/css-menu.asp

Do you think that might work better?

Thanks one more time!

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The article certainly seems to suggest so. Interesting, hadn't seen that article or thought of that. Pretty clever.

My only couple of pennies I can offer is this: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites A bit of a pain to math-out at first (I've given much consideration to developing a Photoshop plugin to do the dirty work) but it should negate the flickers as well, as it doesn't request a new image, just moves the same one around.

Interested to hear about this, keep us posted.

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Jon Culver Chia Pets

Right, the method outlined by that SimpleBits article is very similar. I've sold out and went with a JavaScript method because we needed to finish the website quickly.

This problem is no longer a priority anymore, but I would like to support standards as much as possible. If anyone figures something out anytime soon, please let me know - until then, I'll just have to ask myself, "What the hell is wrong with the Google Toolbar?"

Thanks sparky - PS: a Photoshop plugin that does that would be awesome

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