Postback Freezes Animated Gifs

Hello again all,

<rant>In all my experiences in my life as a geek, I have found few things more frustrating than developing something for any version of Internet Explorer (please hold your shouts of agreement for the end). Internet Explorer 5 never really existed (did the internet exist then even?), Internet Explorer 6 was a complete atrocity, Internet Explorer 7 I am pretty sure caused the suicide rate amongst us geeks to go up significantly, and Internet Explorer 8, while better than its predecessors, only caused a few geeks to become severely dependent on mind-altering drugs to help them cope with the frustrations of life (or maybe just web development for IE).</rant>

You may now cheer…​

Now, down to business. On the topic of Internet Explorer doing things differently from the rest of the world simply for the sake of it (hey look, they’re taking after Apple), I have recently experienced a very frustrating problem with animated gifs. Referring to my previous post about the file uploader, the client I was developing that for wanted an animation icon for the upload so their customers didn’t think the page had frozen. Sounds like a simple task, no?

The problem can be described as this: When a postback event occurs (ie: clicking a link or submit button), Internet Explorer freezes all animated gifs on the page.

To explain how I fixed this, I essentially placed an animated rotating circle on the page which was hidden until the onSubmit() function was called. Here’s the code for the image while it was hidden.

<img src="./images/loading.gif" id="loader" style="visibility:hidden;" />

Annnd here’s the code for the animation problem fix as well as the code that changes the image visibility.

function showLoader(){
   //*** Reload the image for IE ***
   document.getElementById('loader').src='./images/loader.gif';
   //*** Let's make the image visible ***
   document.getElementById('loader').style.visibility = 'visible';
}

Category:HTML Category:Internet_Explorer Category:Microsoft