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Looking for an alternative to $(window).load that is slower than $(document).ready

I am trying to hide my preloader with JavaScript once the DOM and at least the top content has been loaded. The problem is that my page has several iframes which can slow the process down a lot.
My understanding is that if I use jQuery's $(document).ready to hide the preloader, it will be hidden too soon. On the other hand, if I use $(window).load, the waiting time may be too long. So, is there a middle-way solution, - kind of like window.load but without waiting for iframes?
EDIT:
My page has stuff like Facebook Like button Google Translate and a few other scripts that work via iframes. These are not critical elements, and I would not like to wait for them to load fully.
On the other hand, CSS files like Bootstrap, jQuery, etc. are curcially important for the presentation, and therefore to show the page (hide preloader) w/o having these loaded first would be premature.
Thanks.

You could use $(document).ready to determine if a particular element is loaded before hiding your loader.
Or if you have partial views, to have a $(document).ready function in one of those pages js do the loader hide job.
Since you did not provide more info, these are closer to guesses than real solutions.

I think you're looking for document.onload, which will fire when the DOM tree is ready. I believe that it fires before iframes, which all get their own onload callback/event handler.

You can also try placing the script tag at the end of your html file without begin inside an onload or ready function. This will cause it to load the html content, then fire the Javascript.
EDIT
A thought just occurred to me, which may or may not be useful. You probably have an idea about when you want your script to execute. In whatever browser you are using, check the network tab of the development console. There may be some other element's onload function you want to wrap your code in. For example, if you have a background image you want to make sure loads before your code executes, you may want to use it's onload.
As Petre said, lack of info in the question makes answering difficult.

What to use in place of $(document).ready();?

So I'm using jquery along with some plugins I wrote.
I do all the initialization in a $(document).ready(function(){}) block however this is executed when the whole DOM has been loaded and is ready to be used.
However that would take long eg. when there is a server load. Or maybe the user clicks a button that has been loaded while the rest of the page hasn't loaded yet (and thus document.ready() hasn't been executed yet) in which case it would do nothing.
So, what if I want a code to be executed right after the related part of the page has been loaded instead of waiting for the WHOLE page to be loaded?
I know placing inline code right after the html that this js operates on would do the trick but what if that code uses a library like jQuery that hasn't been loaded yet?

I know placing inline code right after the html that this js operates on would do the trick but what if that code uses a library like jQuery that hasn't been loaded yet?
That would be the only way. The HTML is parsed from top to bottom. So you can expect every script you included to be accesible after you included it.

Your page should still work without JavaScript anyway, so a user clicking a button extremely fast will just temporarily have a somewhat degraded experience.
That being said, the DOM is basically ready when the HTML document all scripts are loaded. Since you cannot execute meaningful JavaScript before the JavaScript code is loaded (duh), I'd have a close look at page performance. Sending an HTML document and 2,3 JavaScript files should not be slow.
You could also use the old-style inline event handlers, like <button onclick="registerButtonClickEvent()">. However, this would introduce a complex, potentially buggy and hardly testable layer of temporary event holding.

If your <script src="jquery-whatever.js> line precedes the first clickable element in your HTML, it is guaranteed that the jquery library will be loaded and run before the user has anything useful to click on.
Just don't add async or defer attributes to the script element.

The onload event isn't triggered from all html elements, so you're forced to wait for window load. It doesn't matter where you load jQuery since it will have to wait for document to be ready. That total time required to load jQuery plus the rest of the document will be thet same.

Why call $.getScript instead of using the <script> tag directly?

I don't understand the reason for replacing this:
<script src="js/example.js"></script>
with this:
$.getScript('js/example.js', function() {
alert('Load was performed.');
});
Is there a particular reason to use the jQuery version?

The only reason I can think of is that you get the callback when the script is loaded. But you can get that callback using a script tag, too, by using the load event (or on really old IE, onreadystatechange).
In contrast, there are several negatives to doing it this way, not least that getScript is subject to the Same Origin Policy, whereas a script tag is not.
Even if you need to load a script dynamically (and there are several reasons you might need to do that), frankly unless you really need the callback, I'd say you're better off just loading the script by adding a script tag:
$('head:first').append("<script type='text/javascript' src='js/examplejs'><\/script>");
(Note: You need the otherwise-unnecessary \ in the ending tag in the above to avoid prematurely ending the script tag this code exists within, if it's in an inline script tag.)
script tags added in this way are not subject to the Same Origin Policy. If you want the load callback, then:
$("<script type='text/javascript' src='js/examplejs'><\/script>")
.on("load", function() {
// loaded
})
.appendTo('head:first');
(As I said, for really old IE, you'd have to do more than that, but you shouldn't need to deal with them these days.)

I can think of three reasons you might use the jQuery form:
You want all of your script declarations at the top of your document, but you also know that placing script declarations there forces the browser to download them in their entirety before proceeding further in the page rendering process. This can introduce measurable delay. The jQuery form will schedule the script loads until after the document is finished downloading, similar to the effect of placing all of your <script> tags at the end of the document, only without the syntactic weirdness.
The <script> mechanism is not available to scripts that do not live in the HTML document itself; that is, if a script included on the page with <script> wants to load a script, it has no option but to use a JavaScript-based approach, such as calling the jQuery function.
The jQuery form allows notification of the script's successful execution, in the form of a supplied callback function.

No need to do that..
You do that if you want to load the script dynamically (when needed, and not from the beginning)

The script might depend on jQuery, so it would be a way to prevent the browser trying to load it if it hasn't loaded jQuery.
There are a number of reasons that jQuery might not load, from a simple network failure to a CDN not being whitelisted by a NoScript user.

maybe to control when a script is loaded? On a javascript heavy page, it may be worth waiting to load some things that are non essential until after essential things are loaded.

How to reduce delay of "Onload"?

I'm current using a javascript with the this tag
<body onload="javascript:Mine();">
Now i noticed that it is taking some time to load this function after i open the page.So is there any other way i can reduce this delay ?
Thanks

onload fires when a page is completely loaded. To get things to fire sooner you can either:
Make the page load faster
Remove, reduce and optimize images (and other content, third party adverts are often a major performance kicker)
Follow performance guidelines (such as those from Yahoo!.)
Not use onload
Use a library (such as YUI or jQuery) that provides a domready event
Run the script in a <script> directly (instead of assigning an event handler)

OnLoad waits for all images and other external resources to be completely loaded. If you only want to know that the entire DOM tree with all HTML elements have been loaded, use OnDOMReady.
Note that this is not a trivial task if you want it to work well across many browsers. If you're using jQuery, then they've solved the problem for you, and you can write:
$(document).ready(function() {
Mine();
});
But if not, loading jQuery only for that feature might not improve your page load at all. Another solution, then, would be to put the call just before </body>:
<body>
...
<script type="text/javascript">Mine();</script>
</body>
Most of your DOM tree should be available to you at that point, so that might be a way to go.

Obvious answer: Speed up your page load.
onLoad means, that function will be run after your whole page has finished loading.

Lazy loading the addthis script? (or lazy loading external js content dependent on already fired events)

I want to have the addthis widget available for my users, but I want to lazy load it so that my page loads as quickly as possible. However, after trying it via a script tag and then via my lazy loading method, it appears to only work via the script tag. In the obfuscated code, I see something that looks like it's dependent on the DOMContentLoaded event (at least for Firefox).
Since the DOMContentLoaded event has already fired, the widget doesn't render properly. What to do?
I could just use a script tag (slower)... or could I fire (in a cross browser way) the DOMContentLoaded (or equivalent) event? I have a feeling this may not be possible because I believe that (like jQuery) there are multiple tests of the content ready event, and so multiple simulated events would have to occur.
Nonetheless, this is an interesting problem because I have seen a couple widgets now assume that you are including their stuff via static script tags. It would be nice if they wrote code that was more useful to developers concerned about speed, but until then, is there a work around? And/or are any of my assumptions wrong?
Edit:
Because the 1st answer to the question seemed to miss the point of my problem, I wanted to clarify the situation.
This is about a specific problem. I'm not looking for yet another lazy load script or check if some dependencies are loaded script. Specifically this problem deals with
external widgets that you do not
have control over and may or may not
be obfuscated
delaying the load of the
external widgets until they
are needed or at least, til
substantially after everything else
has been loaded including other deferred elements
b/c of the how
the widget was written, precludes
existing, typical lazy loading
paradigms
While it's esoteric, I have seen it happen with a couple widgets - where the widget developers assume that you're just willing to throw in another script tag at the bottom of the page. I'm looking to save those 500-1000 ms** though as numerous studies by Yahoo, Google, and Amazon show it to be important to your user's experience.
**My testing with hammerhead and personal experience indicates that this will be my savings in this case.

The simplest solution is to set parameter domready to 1 when embedding addthis script into your page. Here is an example:
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js#username=addthis&domready=1">
</script>
I have tested it on IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, and all worked fine. More information on addthis configuration parameters is available here.

This code solves the problem and saves the loading time that I was looking for.
After reading this post about how most current js libraries implement tests for a dom loaded event. I spent some time with the obfuscated code, and I was able to determine that addthis uses a combination of the mentioned doscroll method, timers, and the DOMContentLoaded event for various browsers. Since only those browsers dependent on the DOMContentloaded event would need the following code anyway:
if( document.createEvent ) {
var evt = document.createEvent("MutationEvents");
evt.initMutationEvent("DOMContentLoaded", true, true, document, "", "", "", 0);
document.dispatchEvent(evt);
}
and the rest depend on timers testing for existence of certain properties, I only had to accommodate this one case to be able to lazy load this external JS content rather than using the static script tags, thus saving the time that I was hoping for. :)

Edit: If the goal is simply to have your other contetn load first, try putting the <script> tags near the bottom of your page. It will still be able to catch the DOMContentLoaded and the content that comes before will be loaded before the script.
Original:
in addition to loading on DOMContentLoaded, you could have it load if a certain var is set true. e.g.
var isDOMContentLoaded = false;
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",function() { isDOMContentLoaded = true; }, false);
then add to the other script file
if (isDOMContentLoaded) loadThisScript();
Edit in response to comments:
Load the script, and run the function that the DOMContentLoaded listener fires. (read the script if you're not sure what function is being called ).
e.g.
var timerID;
var iteration=0;
function checkAndLoad() {
if (typeof loadThisScript != "undefined") {
clearInterval(timerID);
loadThisScript();
}
iteration++;
if (iteration > 59) clearInterval(timerID);
}
var extScript = document.createElement("script");
extScript.setAttribute("src",scriptSrcHere);
document.head.appendChild(extScript);
timerID = setInterval(checkAndLoad,1000);
The above will try once a second for 60 seconds to check if the function you need is available, and, if so, run it

AddThis has a section on how to load their tools asynchronously.
Current 'best' solution:
<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=[YOUR PROFILE ID]" async="async"></script>