I have a DIV container with a background image. The background image is a 4 KB repeating stripe. Also in the DIV—in the foreground, so to speak—are lots of thumbnail photographs.

The thumbnail photographs always start loading before the background image, even though the background image:
- appears first in the code
- is a smaller file size than the thumbnail photographs
- is already in the cache

Is there any way to force the background image to display first?

I looked into this a long time ago and as I recall, it varies from browser to browser. Could maybe use an “onload” function for the images so they don’t even begin to load until the rest of the page is done.