Why do chrome pages appear without styling?

Question

The Reddit homepage appears like the below screenshot sometimes.

It happens across all different pages and at different times eg Facebook/Google etc - can anyone shed some light on why?

Answer 1

My unproven theory is that some of the resources involved in the content have timed out while trying to load.

I just loaded www.reddit.com in Safari and viewed the source, and I see that the style sheet is indeed a separate file: http://www.redditstatic.com/reddit.sgQ89UZYDrA.css. So the browser first has to load the main URL (index.html or perhaps a program that generates the content), then the browser locates the stylesheet attribute, and tries to fetch the URL so the style can be applied.