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Ditto (in mandriva 2005, with firefox 1.0.6) although since I have a very slow comp (266Mhz proc, 192 MB RAM) it could simply be that it cant take the heavier graphics of the whatisreal skin. Obviously I dont know if that's a reasonable explanation for you too, Ransom, since I've no idea of the specs of your comp.

Mr Scrub

My system is an XP2200+ with 512MB RAM running KDE3.2. I've seen this sort of effect before very occasionally; it's certainly an artefact of something that this skin is doing.

I suspect it's the "transparency" (am I the only one who grits my teeth at that misnomer?). I imagine one way to test that would be to create an identical skin but with opaque areas instead. Wouldn't look as sexy, but would definitely test whether that's the bug or not.

But Lee is our "looks and style" guru, I'll leave that to him

Could be that (although I've seen other sites with transparent areas without this problem - could just be the number of them in that skin, I suppose!), thanks.

I've done a bit of testing and it looks like the PNG transparencies are causing the scrolling issues in firefox. I haven't found any issues yet in IE4-6 on Win2K but as IE uses "semi-tranparent" GIFs this may be why. At some point I would like to create a "whatisalmostreal" skin as a third optional style for use using the IE GIFs throughout the CSS. You cannot know how it pains me to pander to an IE style in this way but it will be worth it for the sake of usability. We aren't certain yet why the PNGs aren't co-operating more fully.

As a side query, does the slow scrolling make the site un-usable/very annoying or is just noticeable and but that's all?

It's unusably slow (a second or more for each "tick" of the page, IIRC).

OK, I've changed all the PNG transparenncies to the IE semi-transparent GIFs. Doesn't look as nice but it works. There seems to be no lag time in scrolling anymore. It's a temporary fix until we have time to work on an alternate template for selection.