In preparation for this year's fundraiser, I've put a good deal of
effort into optimizing the speed of CentralNotice banner loading. Under
ideal conditions (fast connection, no servers acting up, not many JS
gadgets to compete with), it should take less than a second. Hopefully,
this will reduce the "banner bump" problem and cause fewer misplaced
clicks. For all the gory details see:
http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/CentralNotice/Optimizing_banner_loading#…
These optimizations went into place last week and are now live on all
wikis. If you have any comments or questions, please email me personally
(I don't read wikimedia-l very often).
Cheers,
Ryan Kaldari