Hi rayfusci,
It’s a known problem with the menu in Internet Explorer on slower systems — the IE JavaScript engine is really, really poor, and this is exclusive to IE.
There’s a solution in the works to alleviate this bottleneck and should land in a couple of weeks (it’ll be an automatic update, no plugin update required).
A temporary solution would be to go to Settings > Share/Save buttons > check Only show the menu when the user clicks the Share/Save button . That way, users who incidentally come across (mouse over) the button do not incur a major CPU spike.
Thanks for the note!
Hi micropat, thank you for your reply.
Your work-around keeps unsuspecting people from getting these CPU hits, but if someone wants to use your functionality, they still take the hit. Please consider the following for a work-around (depending, of course, on how long until your permanent solution is ready).
When I click on the Share/Save button with your option “Only show the menu …” not selected, after waiting for the hover menu, I get sent to a page on your site that duplicates the hover menu.
When I click on the Share/Save button with your option “Only show the menu …” selected, there’s no hover menu, but if I click I still have the same long wait before I can do anything. If clicking now meant I immediately got sent to the menu page on your site rather than waiting for the pop-up menu, this would be a great work-around. (And while I’m dreaming, as a general suggestion having that page on your site come up as target=”_blank” would be better; as I think putting up a new page is better than tossing people out of the blog [which is why I like the hover menu]).
You’re absolutely right, that’s a better temporary workaround, particularly if you don’t mind editing the plugin yourself in the meantime!
Optimizing the AddToAny menu for IE’s shortcomings is definitely a priority, because like you said, that menu is better/faster for everyone. The old addtoany.com/share_save page is more of an alternative for visitors without JavaScript than a cure-all anyway. 🙂
Thanks, rayfusci!
Hey Ray,
We deployed a fix that greatly reduces the delay in IE6. Press Shift+Reload to skip cache and see the results immediately.
It turns out that it had mostly to do with IE6’s handling of CSS, namely background images. It’s a known issue with IE6 and has a very specific JavaScript fix, but anyway it’s fixed. 🙂
FYI there are still some optimizations to make for IE6+, bug this was a huge win for IE6.
Thanks again for the report, and let me know if you benchmark again!
Here are your new timings:
Win2K on a 2.0GHz system: 1 second
WinXP on a 400MHz system: 7 seconds
“a huge win” indeed!
Thank you for fixing this.
