This has been an annoyance of this (IMHO very buggy) browser since it was first beta tested. Earlier (5.x) and newer (7.x) versions do not exhibit this problem.
For some reason Microsoft developers broke the caching mechanism for background images, particularly when defined in CSS. This makes for slow screen painting as well as wasted network traffic as each occurrence of the image becomes a new HTTP request to the webserver. This also causes a notable delay in those images painting on the screen and ‘flicker’ when the images are used in CSS rollover effects. Since the image obviously isn’t changed it results in many ‘HTTP 304 Not Modified‘ entries in the server logs.
Fixes…
1. You CAN/SHOULD set the Expiry for the images, however this can be problematic. Since I typically run Apache HTTPD, those instructions follow:
a) Set an explicit expiry time based on MIME types in the http.conf file.
[instructions in separate post]
b) Enable .htaccess for the server and allow its usage in individual folders on the server.
[instructions in separate post]
c) Use client-side technologies to hack around the problem…. you can use many CSS tricks, but I’ve found that JavaScript is the easiest (most compatible) method.
Add the following to a method executed in the onload event of the page…
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
document.execCommand(‘BackgroundImageCache’, false, true);
} catch(e) {}
</script>
NOTE: MSIE will execute the Javascript, Mozilla and other browsers will throw an exception and wind up in the catch block… which ignores the problem.
UPDATE:
With the use of conditional comments, this can be added to an MSIE specific JS file, or even better an MSIE specific CSS file containing the following:
html {
filter: expression(document.execCommand("BackgroundImageCache", false, true));
}
REFERENCES: