Have you ever experienced major slowdown using IE7? It may NOT be memory related. I came across this issue while working on a bug for GameSpot. Users were complaining that the user experience was lagging. It\’s more noticeable with the forums, where the users would drag the scroll bar in long threads, but the page wouldn\’t scroll for a few seconds. RockMFR had the solution, which I shall share with you.
The Solution
It was related to a pseudo selector in CSS, :hover to be exact. I\’ll simplify it so it won\’t look exactly like what it did on GameSpot. The line was incorrectly coded.
Problem
#some_container .anchor:hover{text-decoration:underline;}
Solution
#some_container a.anchor:hover{text-decoration:underline;}
Do you see the difference there? The incorrect way was missing the \”a\”. I\’m not totally positive why this would cause IE7 to hiccup but my theory is that IE7 was trying to apply :hover onto the element with the \”anchor\” class, but had trouble finding it. And because the thread was so long, IE7 MAY have been trying to render and apply the rule to the element with the \”anchor\” class. Another thing is that the rule wasn\’t even being applied in the forum pages, which makes things odd.
Its not the problem to find the element. It will also slow down when you try to use it with a li or whatever instead an a.