iPad orientation animation extremely sluggish when displaying large webviews

Question

When I change the orientation with a relatively empty webview, the screen rotates no problem. As soon as the webview is particularly full with content and it becomes scrollable the rotation animation becomes very slow. The status bar will rotate first, and the view will follow 3-5 seconds later.

Currently, in willRotateToInterfaceOrientation, I simply resize the frame of the webview.

Any of the gurus have any insight? Is there a way to force the view to rotate earlier, or handle the rotation myself? How should I go about this? I thought of displaying a loading screen when this happens, but it seems rather cheesy, especially when users will rotate small webviews.

Thanks!

Answer 1

without reinventing the wheel: no. Rotation takes a long time on large files in safari as well, so its unlikely there is any optimization available. None i have found anyway (and i messed with this issue for quite some time).

Reinventing the wheel: yes, by rolling your own UIWebView and somehow making it outperform apples in terms of rotation speed. good luck.