Anna Filina

If you have never heard of ConFoo, it is one of the most important developer-oriented conferences. The team brings 100 speakers from around the globe to share their hands-on experience with various web technologies. The best news is: it’s driven by the community and is non profit!
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At FooLab, we have been using jQuery because it’s easy to learn, there is a big community with a lot of examples and advice and also because it’s easier to find developers familiar with it. It’s not a bad framework, but it’s very easy to abuse when you do not know how it works and what it implies.
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Some of the web apps that we build at FooLab rely heavily on Javascript. But when your CPU usage is through the roof, where do you start looking?

Many developers start straight with a hypothesis and then try various corrections until something happens. This is a waste of time; no amount of experience changes that. Follow the scientific method.
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I had the strangest bug in Firefox when rendering SVG. I used a 3rd party library called RaphaelJS that can output both VML and SVG based on the browser.

The Context

To allow a user the resizing of a visual element, I created a rectangle with the color “transparent” in the lower-right corner. The transparent shape was placed on top of the visual, thus intercepting mouse events.

The Issue

It all worked nicely in Safari and other browsers. In Firefox, however, the color was output as “none” for some reason, thus NOT intercepting any mouse events. The customer was unhappy. It is not clear whether the problem resides in Firefox or the RaphaelJS lib, but I found a clean workaround.

The Solution

Instead of making the shape transparent, I set its color to black. I then set the opacity to 0 (zero) and bingo! The shape was still invisible but the mouse events were properly intercepted in all major browsers.

{  color: "#000"
   opacity: 0
}