I recently had an annoying IE experience

Saturday, December 16, 2006

I recently had an annoying IE experience. I had to add Ajax to a big HTML table; 2.8MB worth of HTML (not under my control so don't bother with the obvious). Each row had a single field form in the last column, to which I had to add an Ajax submit function. I added some UI features where I used className switching on the text input element. This way I could define the UI presentation in CSS, a much easier way to do it than in javascript. However, I discovered an annoying thing. In Firefox the classswitching was fine, the UI updated and all was groovy, however in IE6 and IE7 every time the input className was changed, there was a delay of several seconds while the browser was frozen, making it totally unusable.

So I switched tactics. I changed the input style properties directly in javascript and what do you know, IE worked fine. It appears as if the IE renderer is doing a complete repaint of the table when a single element has a className change, but it doesn't do that when individual style properties are changed. How bloody annoying is that. And the fact that IE7 does exactly the same thing leads me to believe there isn't really that much difference between the two browsers, the HTML renderer at least.

Random outings from a chaotic mind