I could make a ten minute movie of NetSurf trying to get to a post at 
the bottom of one of my forum threads. It seems to spend most of its 
time and processing power reformatting the page after every one or two 
images have been fetched. But the real killer is, if I try to scroll 
up to see how far it's got, it throws me down to the bottom again. I 
have to wait until it's finished thrashing about before I can use the 
vertical scroll bar.

A contributory problem is that it first formats all images according 
to the space needed for the 'alt' text and then when it's got the 
image it reformats the page again using the image dimensions. It does 
this even if it's given the width and height in the tag.

There has to be a better way. For a start, if the user scrolls the 
page then forget about any on-page name/id tags you were trying to get 
to - the user has taken control. Otherwise finish formatting the page 
and only then jump to the name tag.

Secondly, forget about the 'alt' text unless fetching the image fails, 
and then format the text within the image dimensions if known. Better 
still, display the alt text in the "About this object" window (Object 
> Object > Info). Time for a feature request!

-- 
Richard Porter                        http://www.minijem.plus.com/
                                      mailto:[email protected]
I don't want a "user experience" - I just want stuff that works.

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