Some tradeoffs though; this is what it looks like on IE9 http://i.imgur.com/EkH81zN.png
Edit: he commented below saying it was IE11 with the IE9 emulation enabled.
There are 3MB of images on the page; the problem seems to be the high-res map, which weights in at 1.5MB. This image is 2290x798 and it's in an element of 1145x399. I've halved the resolution and converted it to a JPEG, now it's 0.2MB. To make it even easier for you to show the designers I've uploaded it here: http://imgur.com/XcGllGz.
EDIT: it's worse, almost every image in the carousel is double-sized and unoptimized.
Otherwise it's pretty.
This will bring the color palette down to less than 256, some images will work better than others, in this case I didn't notice a difference and the size went from 434KB to 133KB in size using the batch file I normally use for this[1]... I haven't checked recently to see if there are newer tools/versions for use, I keep several utils inside my dropbox for windows usage.
Ok, that explains the huge PNGs; can't they be rendered as-is (i.e. include part of the background in the foreground picture?
> first paint is still under 3s
That's really slow. The jankey animation (yay Apple) and rasterized image rendering is horrible; it's a throwback to the late-90s internet.
> the audience for this page is 90% software developers, > with powerful machines and high bandwidth.
I.e. me, and I find it horribly slow. I'm using a year old rMBP and I have a pretty good internet connection (20MB/s, 10x what I could get in the UK and I actually get pretty close to the max all the time; for a comparison: http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2014/08/internet-speed-gap-...).
Sure, I'd love fiber, but that's not exactly broadly available (though if I could move my house 1km to the east I'd have it).