Tag: ‘javascript’ · TangleBones

Background Tab Strangeness

In the past I’ve noticed some strange behav­iors in WebKit based browsers, espe­cially when open­ing tabs in the back­ground. For instance, some­times if a page con­tains an embed­ded YouTube video (or the like), Safari on the Mac won’t load the video unless you go to the tab and reload the whole page. Frus­trat­ing, but no big deal.

I was will­ing to chalk that up to the ever-​crappy Mac ver­sion of the Adobe Flash plugin (so slow, Adobe! Why do you hate us?), but then I opened a link to this nifty new Javascript-​based graph­ing library in a back­ground tab in Google Chrome and when I clicked over got this:

(It’s a little tricky to see, but a bunch of the graph’s labels are way off to the left.)

Now, Safari on Win­dows doesn’t have this prob­lem, and I’m not sure if that’s because it’s an issue with a par­tic­u­lar snap­shot of WebKit, or some­thing Google did in imple­ment­ing their custom Javascript engine V8. Either way, that sucks.