Visiting msnbc.com, trying to scroll down a news article results in slow, jerky movement. In contrast, SDMB threads or Wikipedia articles scroll by in glassy smooth fashion.
What’s going on with MSNBC pages that makes them so slow? Any fixes I can implement on my end?
MSNBC.com scrolls normally for me (FF 4.01).
Are you finding this with all their pages? What is your browser?
I’m experiencing the same problem. And it’s only msnbc.com that does it. (Windows Vista, IE7.)
No problems here. W7, IE9. Why are you still using IE7? Not a snide comment, just wondering if there’s a reason you haven’t upgraded.
Because I’m comfortable with IE7. Is that what is causing the scrolling problem? If so then I probably will upgrade. (Can I go straight from 7 to 9, or do I have to go from 7 to 8 to 9?)
I couldn’t really say if it’s the cause, though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if upgrading fixed it. I imagine that Microsoft likes to keep MSNBC.com and the like on the leading edge of browser tech, and IE7 is coming up on 5 years old. I believe you can go directly from 7 to 9. Just take the standard precaution of making sure your data is backed up.
Well, technically Microsoft will upgrade you to 8, then 9, I believe, but that’s not important. What is important is to remember that Internet Explorer 9 only works on Vista or Window 7. I know a lot of people around here have Windows XP.
Oh, and Internet Explorer 9 is currently the fastest web browser in quite a lot of tests, so scrolling should be better. IE8, on the other hand, is about the same speed as IE7.
I have similar problems with the site and only that site. In my case, when I check Task Manager, I find that IE Explorer is runnning at 99 in the processes tab. I am running IE8, XP with the latest service packs.
I have also found that my computer almost locks up until the MSNBC site can work through and finally open a sub-site, at which time the attempting to scroll is very frustrating. I have quit using the site as a result, but I miss following news and commentary on the site.
Are they using some strange font or some format that causes problems?
That’s the kind of thing I normally charge to diagnose. 
But I wager it’s due to some rogue JavaScript running on the site that either behaves badly in IE7 (but works correctly in all other browsers), or behaves badly in all browsers but IE7’s JS engine is just so. damn. slow. it’s the only browser that really exhibits a problem.
Microsoft is run by dummies; if they saw it was impacting their bottom-line, they’d fix it. My guess it the share of IE6/IE7 traffic is so low at this point (probably hovering around the 2-4% point) that it’s not worth the development time to diagnose and fix. Especially since the site works, it’s just slow.
If you really want, you can turn off JavaScript, but that’s all-or-nothing in IE7.
It’s usually load or executing a lot of scripts. You can turn a lot of that off in your browser. Depending on the situation you may not be able to scroll at all, get jumpy scrolling, or smeared scrolling.
It’s scrolling fine on my browser (IE8), but I have lots of crap disabled* as well (including Flash). The person you are responding to is also using IE8, not 7 (this is a zombie thread revived by that person).
*necessary due to my shitty connection
Where in the browser do I find the place to turn off the scripts and rogue fonts?
Tools>Internet Options>Security/Advanced (depending on what exactly you want to do).
Also Tools>Manage Add-Ons for even more options. It is too complicated to explain further than that in one post, however (it’s a lot easier if you can actually see it and know what to look for).
Thanks. I found it, but after disabling JS, the site was pretty worthless, so I put is back and will just avoid MSNBC.
FF is fast, but both IE and Chrome (latest versions) are clearly not as smooth as they could/should be.
It’s hard to say for certain what’s going on, but here’s a hypothesis:
Traditional web pages render as a static page, and let the browser handle any scrolling. The browser doesn’t have a lot to do here once the page is rendered–it’s like scrolling an image, and modern computers can do that very smoothly these days.
However, with Javascript and other technologies, web pages can handle features like scrolling themselves. This is usually done so that the page can have extra features, such as a menu bar that stays at the top/side no matter where you are in the document. Handling the scrolling this way is more powerful but requires more horsepower, because the page is being partially re-rendered every time you scroll a bit.
It appears that msnbc.com is using this method to some extent. On FF and Chrome, you can see that the bar containing “Home, US, World, etc.” stays at the top of the screen until you get past the color region. Oddly, IE does not do the same for me, even though it’s clearly the slowest one. So there is something browser-dependent going on (which I’d write off as IE suckitude).