It’s funny how an anti-social person like myself has to work on Internet social networking for websites. After all, it is the “in” thing, and it is marketing. Marketing is good!
We added this AddThis button to our site to promote social networking. It was easy, and it helped obsolete the dated “Tell A Friend” feature. Well, nothing is easy.
A day after the AddThis button was installed, we discovered that our fast loading pages were no longer fast on IE 8. In fact, the IE 8 status indicator would just kept circling. That was annoying. So after much digging around online, just after I had written to AddThis to request to host our own AddThis code, I found a fix on AddThis.com. So you should try adding the following code to the AddThis javascript if you run into a similar issue:
In v.1 of the API, add:
var addthis_disable_flash = true;
</script>
In v.2 of the API, add:
var addthis_config = {
data_use_flash: false
}
</script>
So the issue was Flash related. We are glad that our pages are fast loading again, and we get to keep the AddThis button.
It is no longer necessary to included this javascript as recent tests on the addthis.com server seem to have responsed quickly with or without this code.