Same issue on Chrome 18 and Safari 5. What steps will reproduce the problem? 1. Set CSS multiple backgrounds in the html element including at least one large image (not sure if necessary that the image is large). My actual css because it might be useful : html { background: url("img/smoke.jpg") center top no-repeat, /* 1700*1000px */ url("img/incbot.png") center repeat-y, /* 1000*30px */ url("img/bg2.png") center top repeat-x, /* 40*1000px */ #000 url("img/bg1.png") center top repeat /* 40*40px */ } 2. Make CSS body centered with width: 1000px; margin: 0 auto; and background: #fff. 3. When click on a link in the body with round corners (don't know if necessary), put this link in a selected state (set background-color and inner box-shadow) What is the expected result? Selected state should be instant. What happens instead? Selected state takes about a half (or a quarter) second to be visible which gives a feeling of slowness of the UI. Additional info: If I remove the multiple background, it works perfectly and the selected state is instant so there is no feeling of slowness. UserAgentString: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.54 Safari/535.19