Is there a way to speed up the rendering of Polylines in Google Maps when using Internet Explorer (7)? My map loads quickly in other browsers.
I've encoded the Polylines as described here - http://facstaff.unca.edu/mcmcclur/GoogleMaps/EncodePolyline/ and they are loaded from a static JavaScript file.
The ie7 is slower than firefox3 (and ie6 is slower than ie7) to render large and complex polylines with javscript.
There could be some minor tricks to speed up the rendering, (smooth the lines before rendering, adjusting for zoomlevel and such).
One trick is maybe to create a kml instead and leave on a public url and use that in google maps. A more "enterprise" trick is to use geoserver or mapserver and create overlays. That would really boost performance.(They are truly serverside)
This is probably because ie doesn't support canvas or svg or whatever it is that google maps uses to draw the lines. To get around this, the line data is sent to google, and they turn it into an image that is then downloaded and displayed.
Tom, google maps uses VML to draw the lines in IE. Firefox uses SVG. The image transformation is for browsers not supporting SVG or VML.