Scott Blomquist

One thing I love about working with software is that no matter how much you know, you can still be surprised by tiny little quirks that lurk in every software system.

Two great examples from today:

1. Firefox is happy to follow HTTP redirects while trying to fetch an image. IE seems to not be so happy. It got a redirect instead of an image? Image doesn’t show up in the page.
2. ASP.net doesn’t send a session cookie to the client web browser if you haven’t set any session variables. This is fine under 99.9% of circumstances, but doesn’t work so well when you’re trying to do something with the session ID that ASP.net is never going to hear about. It causes you to get really confused when the session ID changes per page instead of per session.

I’ve noticed an ever-increasing trend on my favorite laptop that sometimes it just doesn’t feel like hearing every keypress. It’ll often leave some random letter out of a word if I’m typing at full speed.

Today, I finally spotted that it only happens in my web browser, and furthermore, I noticed that it only happens on web sites that have onkeypress events. It seems that the event queueing mechanism doesn’t hear all keypresses if the onkeypress event takes too long. Web developers, please don’t make onkeypress so slow that my keys get eaten.