jQuery UI datepicker performance

Question

I have a textbox on my web page that is used to specify a date, so I'd like to use the jQuery DatePicker. However, most of my users are locked into using IE6 and the performance of the jQuery DatePicker is a little sluggish in this browser.

Can anyone recommend an alternate JavaScript date picker, or any means of improving the display performance of the jQuery DatePicker?

Answer 1

I also ran into this problem. Here are a couple of things that can help performance in IE6:

1. Turn on background image caching. This will load images before the datepicker is shown:

   try {
       document.execCommand("BackgroundImageCache", false, true);
   } catch(exception) {
       // other browsers do nothing
   }
   

2. Turn off animations. Things won't look as nice, but performance is what matters:

   $("#datepicker").datepicker( { showAnim: '' });
   

These seemed to help a bit for me. There may be other small tweaks you can do also.