Preventing The IE6 CSS Background Flicker

By  on  

One of the nagging issues that Internet Explorer creates is a flicker on anchor tag background images. Did you know, however, that there is a quick and easy way to prevent that problem using a little bit of JavaScript? Simply place the following JavaScript code in the header section of your website, refresh the page, and bid adieu to another IE6 issue.

Recent Features

  • By
    Designing for Simplicity

    Before we get started, it's worth me spending a brief moment introducing myself to you. My name is Mark (or @integralist if Twitter happens to be your communication tool of choice) and I currently work for BBC News in London England as a principal engineer/tech...

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    QuickBoxes for Dojo

    Adding to my mental portfolio is important to me. First came MooTools, then jQuery, and now Dojo. I speak often with Peter Higgins of Dojo fame and decided it was time to step into his world. I chose a simple but useful plugin...

  • By
    Prevent Page Zooming in Mobile Browsers

    Ever since I got my iPhone, I've been more agreeable in going places that my fiancee wants to go. It's not because I have any interest in checking out women's shoes, looking at flowers, or that type of stuff -- it's because my iPhone lets...

Discussion

  1. Steve

    You can do the same thing by using .htaccess to cache the file. I don’t know if there is a minimum cache offset but a day works. And if you are following the yslow guidelines you get this as an added benefit. The flicker is actually caused by IE revalidating the image. The advantage to this method beyond speeding up your site is it doesn’t require JavaScript to work.

  2. Awesome man! Thanks for sharing this.

  3. Thanks, this worked great! A simple solution to an annoying behavior.

  4. P

    Hi,

    Where can I get the Javascript code to resolve the issue?

    regards,

    N

  5. valentina

    great! and thank you!

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!