performance hit when using overflow:scroll?

[William Gill]

I haven't done it in a while, but I have on occasion placed a list
inside a box of a specific height (in ems of course) to prevent the list
from taking over the entire layout. However I noticed a significant
slowing at the browser end when doing this, most notably in MSIE, to the
point that I discontinued the practice. If memory serves me (which is a
risky proposition in itself) the browser worked well until
scrollbars/scrolling became necessary. Has anyone ever noticed the use
of this property causing the browser to crawl, if so is there anything
that can be done to minimize it?

[dorayme]

In article <tb******************@fe115.usenetserver.com>,
William Gill <no*****@example.comwrote:

I haven't done it in a while, but I have on occasion placed a list
inside a box of a specific height (in ems of course) to prevent the list
from taking over the entire layout. However I noticed a significant
slowing at the browser end when doing this, most notably in MSIE, to the
point that I discontinued the practice. If memory serves me (which is a
risky proposition in itself) the browser worked well until
scrollbars/scrolling became necessary. Has anyone ever noticed the use
of this property causing the browser to crawl, if so is there anything
that can be done to minimize it?

In general best to avoid putting heights (even in em). Got a particular
URL that shows this? I would not imagine it should cause significant
delay, why not post a test case?

--
dorayme

[William Gill]

dorayme wrote:

In article <tb******************@fe115.usenetserver.com>,

In general best to avoid putting heights (even in em). Got a particular
URL that shows this? I would not imagine it should cause significant
delay, why not post a test case?

Sorry, no URL. They seemed to slow the browser up so bad I removed them
all. Not page load time, the browser itself slowed to a crawl,
scrolling, both inside the box, and the browser window were painfully slow.

However, I just tried it again on a page in development and it doesn't
seem to do that any more. I'm a little confused since I can't seem to
duplicate the original problem. It could be IE6 or an old computer
were the root, since both have been upgraded.

as for putting heights, I frequently put text blocks in a layout in the
same manner as images, with height and width as considerations for how
the "insert" impacts the overall balance, and aesthetics of the page.
If I have a long list of links to articles, I may not want them
dominating the layout. That's why I wanted to use the height limitation
and the scroll.