When linking to page with hash in url it flashes the top before jumping to id in IE

Question

We are trying to link to a page and in that link we supply the has to point to an elements id on another page for it to jump immediately down to that element. We know that when checking this functionality on other sites most of the time you don't see the flash of top of the page before the page jumps, we don't know why this might be happening on our site, but it doesn't happen on our staging site.

It always loads the page and then jumps down, it doesn't happen in Firefox or any other browser other then all of the IE versions.

We have memcache installed on the server for production but not staging so this is a possible reason, but I don't know for sure.

Answer 1

The browser is a progressive rendering device. It will display the page as it downloads. Only when the element corresponding to your #fragment arrives and is added to the page can the page scroll to show it. Until then, better that the browser at least shows something than to leave the user twiddling their thumbs waiting for some page content.

Browsers may download files and update the page at slightly different rates depending on a number of factors, so your particular page may behave differently on different browsers. But in general having a page with a #fragment jump into place after the initial display is a normal and expected part of the web.