Technical Note: Delays Debugged
Charles Johnson
Sun Feb 17, 2008 at 6:01 pm PST • Views: 176
That typing delay problem I mentioned earlier, that showed up in the comment posting form and the link posting forms?
It’s history.
The excruciatingly technical reason, because some geek somewhere may benefit from it:
Turns out that some browsers are much slower at performing the Javascript innerHTML() function than others. I mean, much slower. Safari is reasonably fast, and Internet Explorer isn’t too bad, but this is one area where Firefox 2.0.0.12 really bites.
And in a recent refactoring effort, I changed the code that counts the number of characters you type into our text entry fields, to use the innerHTML method of displaying the count. That was my mistake, because I didn’t realize how badly Firefox bites in the innerHTML department.
Now, instead of using the innerHTML method of a SPAN element, the character count is displayed with a text INPUT element, and to display the count as you type, the jQuery code changes the value attribute of that text INPUT.
Which turns out to be a lot faster in all browsers, and that annoying, thoroughly bogus type-ahead slow-down is now a thing of the past.
One bug slain.
Frank says: