Talk:Flash of unstyled content

Meaningfulness
I think this actually is meaningful content. It describes a real bug in IE. When googling for "Flash of Unstyled Content", I get about 15.000 hits.
 * I dunno, smacks of original research to me, or pimping the linked article. If you fleshed out the article some more, provided multiple links I'd be happier. But I'll cull the tag anyway. --Blowdart 20:15, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Thank you! It is the first article I have contributed with, so I'm happy you let it be. I understand it is not safe from deletion yet, though. I'll try expanding it a bit. Beornas 20:21, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

I've experienced FOUC and learned how to eliminate it from my web pages
I found the flash from plaintext to styled text unnerving. I like to think I craft nice pages. I'm on a modern Mac, OS X, and Safari, my websites are often WordPress -- a mix of HTML, php, javascript and usually heavily styled.

I Googled on "fouc safari" and found much corroborating the existence of the problem, like Tim Murtaugh at o2b.net, and an August 2006 claim at stylegala.com that FOUC had been written out of Safari, which can't be true since I'm using a build of Safari later than that.

At 456BereaStreet.com the author says the problem is random. It's not. It can be consistently reproduced provided the browser cache is cleared between each attempt.

Old information geared to MSIE offers "fixes" that are really just tweeks to the section of HTML pages, reorganizing the lines or inserting blank, or "dummy," script and style calls. Not elegant, and not successful in Safari.

At jonaquino.blogspot.com (Feb 2007), Jonathan Aquino offers what seems the most plausible explanation for FOUC and offers the cleanest (most proper) fix for Safari. According to Aquino, Safari pulls javascript and style in parallel streams. One or the other stream may try to access a style property unset or reset by the other stream. Firefox pulls the two streams sequentially, "... in series rather than in parallel....", according to Mr. Aquino.

I'm on the prowl for a Safari patch, meanwhile I have Mr. Aquino's fix. At this point, I myself think FOUC may have been a teapot-sized tempest, something that will fade into cyber-trivia like the once irksome TRS-80 "flying a" that appeared at the top of the line instead on the baseline. FOUC doesn't need a Wikipedia page, as Wikipedia cannot become a clearing house for odd bugs.

John Sinclair (talk) 17:12, 17 February 2008 (UTC)


 * As of 20:44, 18 December 2010 (UTC), I've rethought my statement above, "FOUC doesn't need a Wikipedia page...", because I continue to find internet commentary on the problem. The topic probably does warrant more exposure. Even today, web page developers can cause momentary flashes of un-styled content.


 * There's a useful mention of FOUC at http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html.


 * More insight into download precedence (parallel vs. sequential) is at http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/04/09/dont-use-import/.


 * John Sinclair (talk) 20:44, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

And yet another external link: http://paulirish.com/2009/avoiding-the-fouc-v3/. ''Paul Irish is (as far as I can tell) knowledgeable and practiced in website front-end development. From .htaccess to HTML and CSS. Worth a read. I don't know why, but I seem to magnetically attract more and more junk knowledge about FOUC.'' John Sinclair (talk) 18:17, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

IE
The following solves this problem in Firefox 3 on XP (please press Edit to see the code): After body:

document.observe("dom:loaded", function {   $('myDiv').show;  } );  

content of page

  $('myDiv').hide; 

90.230.226.220 (talk) 13:46, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

The FOUC Problem (Safari-related link) broken
The FOUC Problem link http://webkit.org/blog/66/the-fouc-problem/ is broken for me at the moment. I was able to read what I think is the same one through a search engine cache, but its date is "Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 10:59 pm" which is different from ~2004 as mentioned in this article. I think it may also be one of the sources for the idea of advertisements, content being loaded from outside the page, etc. causing FOUC. Should another source be found if this one stays down? Aediapony (talk) 16:10, 24 January 2012 (UTC)


 * I just checked the source, it is up again, and is now accessible with SSL. I will update the URL accordingly to  as I had no problem navigating there. If you find alternates, that would be great to include as well, of course .--FeralOink (talk) 12:04, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Slightly separate matter: I use Chrome browser and Windows 7, yet experience FOUC with increasing frequency of late, so I believe that this article has continued relevance, perhaps even more so than in the past, as it is quite a widespread phenomena I think, but I don't know if the causes cited in this article are all-inclusive for present times. They might be though...! --FeralOink (talk) 12:05, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Unclear information in the image
This article should have a second image showing what the page looks like after it finishes loading. I can't find any places in the image that look unusual for that page to look like. If it's too late to get back to the page in the image to create another image, then try out another page that's the same type of page as the one in the image. Blackbombchu (talk) 23:38, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

More relevant than ever
I believe the article is now more relevant than ever before. As the volumes of data traffic continue to increase, perhaps the networks are approaching (local) saturation more frequently? (I have no data on that; it's just a hunch.) If so, that could be causing ever more variable delays in delivering all the content necessary to fully style a web page.

FWIW, in my experience, a FOUC is now more likely to happen than it ever did in previous years. I see it now maybe at least every second day, whereas once, months might pass after an incident before I saw it again. Context: mostly Firefox (and rarely IE) on Windows 7 Ultimate (desktop); mostly Firefox (and rarely IE) on Windows 8.1 (Windows Surface Pro tablet); mostly the native Browser (and rarely Firefox) on Android (7" tablet). The problem occurs in my main browser on all three systems.  I've also seen it in Firefox on several other Windows 7 and 8.1 systems that I use occasionally on a different network.  I'm not sure I remember ever seeing it on IE in the last three years, but then I've hardly used IE.

I also think the explanations given on the article page may not apply to the variety of systems in use today; they seem oriented more towards detailing the early history of the term and the phenomenon it describes. Before CSS, many web pages consisted of a little static HTML, so that all the page content arrived at once when that HTML was read. Now, however, many resources for a page arrive asynchronously whenever the Internet manages to deliver them, often leading to visible delays of at least several seconds and sometimes much worse. I think this is a reasonable explanation why FOUCs may be happening more often; however, my thoughts on the matter are not authoritative - just Original Research! So if anybody knows some reputable secondary sources that explain the phenomenon, please use them to improve the article.

For instance, are there any reliable studies giving: over the last couple of decades?
 * comparisons of, or trends in, average web page load times
 * measures of web page complexity or resource dispersion

yoyo (talk) 16:22, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Flash of unstyled content. Please take a moment to review my edit. You may add after the link to keep me from modifying it, if I keep adding bad data, but formatting bugs should be reported instead. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether, but should be used as a last resort. I made the following changes:
 * Attempted to fix sourcing for http://www.bluerobot.com/web/css/fouc.asp/

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at ).

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 20:57, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Ambiguity in article that needs fixing
The article refers to a

"...change in rendering behaviour in Google Chrome version 50, whereby stylesheets injected by JavaScript are prevented from blocking page loading, as required by the HTML5 specification,..."

This is ambiguous, and has two completely opposite possible meanings. It might mean either

a change in rendering behaviour in Google Chrome version 50, whereby [stylesheets injected by JavaScript are prevented from blocking page loading], as required by the HTML5 specification],

or

a change in rendering behaviour in Google Chrome version 50, whereby stylesheets injected by JavaScript are prevented from [blocking page loading, as required by the HTML5 specification],

That is, the HTML5 specification either requires or prohibits having stylesheets injected by Javascript from blocking page loading, and this sentence tries and fails to tell you which. I'd fix it myself, but I don't know which is correct (I encountered this page not as a wikipedia contributor who wanted to edit and improve it, but as a wikipedia user who wanted to learn the basics of the subject). I'm happy to reword to make this clearer if someone will tell me what it means.Andylatto (talk) 11:19, 3 July 2020 (UTC)