Problem with Google Chrome and Twitter

Google Chrome 16.0 and Twitter Direct Message Problem

First, I can't believe my version of Chrome is now on 16.0.912.75. It seems like only yesterday I had Chrome version 1 and it didn't change for a good while.

Unlike Internet Explorer which refuses to force automatic updates on their browser users which mean developers still have to cater for IE 6 and non standard compliant code due to IE 9 not being available on Win Vista or XP. I do appreciate that they automatically upgrade the browser when required.

However it does seem like FireFox (version 9.0.1 I am currently on now) and Chrome are in some kind of race to see who can get to version 100 first. I haven't exactly noticed many differences between all these nightly version changes so it must be bug fixing as if it isn't I have no idea what it is apart from security hole patches.

Anyway, I recently got a new laptop for work (a DELL, 64bit, quad core i5 Win7) which is good APART from the horrible, horrible flat mouse pad which seems to go into sticky scroll mode a lot. You know when suddenly the mouse cursor turns from a pointer into cross-hairs and as you move the cursor the whole page scrolls with it.

Tonight I noticed an issue with this and Twitter's new format for Direct Messages which open in a draggable DIV popup.

I went to write a Direct Message and the cursor went into sticky mode. I couldn't remove the mouse cursor from the pop div as wherever it went so did the popup box. Very annoying.

What was interesting was that as soon as this issue occurred my CPU and Memory for the Google Chrome.exe *32 process went shooting through the roof and my laptop turned into a helicopter. I honestly thought the machine was going to take off it was that loud from the hard-drive spinning away.

The only solution was to move the cursor off the webpage to the toolbar and kill the page totally and as I did the CPU and Memory dropped like a stone from a cliff.

This is obviously an issue with DELL's mousepad but it reminded me of an issue I had with my own HTML WYSIWYG editor which was a pop DIV you could drag about the screen.

The editor had a couple of listboxes on it for selecting fonts and sizes etc but because I had a a drag event attached to a mousedown and mousemove event it meant that you could never actually open the list and scroll it down to the bottom as if you did all that happened was the Editor moved around the screen.

It was a simple drag n drop solution which was fired by a mouse down event setting a flag so that when set any mouse move event moved the referenced DIV until a mouse up event set the flag off.

I got round the problem at first by just making the top and bottom sections of the DIV container for the editor draggable which did fix the issue but in the end I settled for what is getting more common as a solution for the old pop up window, the lightbox.

I don't know why Twitter need to make their new message pop div's draggable as they change the backgrounds opactity like a lightbox anyway so I don't see the point in the draggable effect at all.

I know it would certainly help with my DELL's sticky mousepad problem!