In the last few days we have noticed that IE8 during page load occasionally shows momentarily a blank (white) page. It does not happen every single time. I would estimate about 10%. This issue has been brought to our attention by visitors on a site with several millions pages a day, which suggests that it has really appeared very recently. However, a quick look at the recent Windows updates did not reveal any changes related to IE at all. Also, I tried to turn on and off all possible options in IE, turn off all extensions, switch on and off compatibility mode, tried various doctypes etc. without any success. The problem can be demonstrated even on a very simple example:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Test</title>
<style type="text/css">
body { background-color: Black; color: White; }
a { color: White; }
</style>
</head>
<body style="background-color: Black;" bgcolor="Black">
<a href="test.html">Reload</a>
</body>
</html>
Just click on the reload link repeatedly, and you will see a white flash occasionally. Can anybody else confirm it? I run Vista, but it has been reported also on XP. It seems like some internal repainting problem such as when you don’t make the window background transparent in the RegisterClass function.