Sites that trigger onLoad before startRender

Analysis
1

I ran into a site where the startrender triggers like more than 2 seconds after onLoad (www.vistaprint.com if you must know) and was curious to see if this was a common enough pattern among top websites and hence ran the following query

select url,rank,
FROM httparchive:runs.latest_pages
where renderStart > onLoad and rank < 1000
group by rank,url 
order by rank,url;

An sure enough Microsoft properties like live, outlook, hotmail, Nokia, Zynga and Coursera were falling into this category. Whats the benefit of triggering onLoad way before you start rendering your first pixel?

Manually verified a few using webpagetest

Microsoft: http://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=140409_GQ_YTB-r:1-c:0
Nokia: http://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=140409_99_YTJ-r%3A1-c%3A0&thumbSize=200&ival=1000&end=visual

2

There is no benefit! All of them are just really good examples of a really bad critical rendering paths.

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