internet explorer 8 does not support the textcontent property

Internet Explorer consistently takes > 30,000 ms (30 seconds) except for the 'null' selection (a dummy function that simply 'returns null'), which performs as fast as Firefox. On my machine, Firefox consistently completes any of the function selections in less than 500 ms (1/2 second) for 100,000 items. It will generate the specified number of elements within a, then time itself as it calls the selected property on each node. ( Firebug and the 'Venkman' JavaScript Debugger extensions exist for Firefox.)īelow is some sample JavaScript to demonstrate the issue. Unfortunately, there don't appear to be any good (and free) JavaScript profilers for Internet Explorer. (Firefox seems to work almost instantaneously, so increasing the length of the iteration quickly yields an exponential growth in the difference.Īdditionally, these properties seem to be internally cached by Internet Explorer, such that calling the property repeatedly on the same node results in almost immediate results after the initial call - important for testing this.)

innerHTML quickly became apparent under Internet Explorer.īasic testing showed that iterative use of these properties took on the order of 100x longer than the. innerText is used.Īn almost equal performance issue with both. textContent returns a value that can be evaluated to true, it will be used as the result.Ġ, -0, null, false, NaN, undefined, or the empty string ( '') all evaluate to false. This works due to the conditional logic in JavaScript. It doesn't help that even the most popular JavaScript libraries don't provide a helper method for this issue. using document.all - which aren't even related to the issue. To make matters worse, many developers seem to find obscure ways of detecting which property to use, often by using browser detection or other similarly flawed methods like detecting for other browser properties - e.g. innerText has 'no public standard that applies to this property'. textContent is 'standards-compliant', defined by the W3C.Īs Microsoft admits on their MSDN page. innerHTML properties are a bit of an issue themselves. But maybe this is not necessary in this function For me, the transpiled code leads to a tsc problem (tsc version 2.1.6): 18:05:34. innerHTML properties to further analyze - you guessed it - the text content.

This involved traversing the HTML DOM tree, very much like the high-performance approach described in Java: Iterating over XML DOM Nodes, then using the. In this particular case, I was working on a JavaScript-based search form that performed special search functions on data in an IFRAME, supporting restrictions on location and the use of regular expressions. Here's another one of those situations where you write some HTML/JavaScript using a standards-compliant web browser such as Firefox, then have to correct any issues that appear under Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Internet explorer 8 does not support the textcontent property