Interesting. Wonder if this is related to a minor issue I've been having. Some pages do hang and never load for me, too. I've switched my primary browser at work to Chrome after an upgrade to FF4 caused some JavaScript hanging issues that I haven't had time to troubleshoot.

In any case, I'll usually open MyFlyerTalk and then control-click all of the "Go to first unread post" buttons at once (if I've been off for >12 hours, it can be a good couple dozen). The tabs all load in the background, but ever sine switching to Chrome, inevitably 1-2 of the tabs will just sit perpetually at "Loading." I haven't really looked at it more closely, but I'll see if I can tell what it's hanging on next time.

Indeed, it's rather annoying, but it's quickly resolved by hitting enter in the address bar (I've never had it hang after reloading).

Like LIH Prem, I'm also a premium member with no ads, if it matters.

I can answer one question for LIH Prem: images.ibsrv.net is Internet Brands' Content Delivery Network service. In order to speed up the browsing experience, common graphics (i.e. all of the buttons, icons, and smileys) are hosted there--for example, the image link for the wink smiley is http://images.ibsrv.net/ibsrv/res/sr...ilies/wink.gif. Thus, each http request for a graphical page element only has to travel to a CDN edge point near you (for me, it's an EdgeCast node in SEA) instead of all the way to IB's server cluster in LAX. (The biggest savings is probably for international users, where ping times between continents can be 200+ms, as the URL will resolve to a server much closer to them.) On a page with a lot of graphical elements, it can be a huge timesaver. It also reduces the stresses on IB's servers, since the only thing those servers have to do is generate the page itself (text from the database, etc.).

I don't know if any ads are hosted on images.ibsrv.net (I'd doubt it--they're probably all hosted by third parties). Most of the ads I see are Flash ads hosted by ad.doubleclick.net, etc., but I do see some static ad images hosted on static.ibsrv.net (as well as some other page elements at ui.ibsrv.net). Not sure why it's hanging, though...