Is “finally” the answer to all IE6 memory leak issues?
Hedger Wang has been scanning a lot of Chinese blogs lately for solutions to IE6 and memory leak issues. One of the things he stumbled upon is a pretty nifty way of nulling the objects to stop memory leaks by using the try ... finally construct. So instead of this solution which leaks memory:
JAVASCRIPT:
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function createButton() {
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var obj = document.createElement(“button”);
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obj.innerHTML = “click me”;
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obj.onclick = function() {
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//handle onclick
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}
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obj.onmouseover = function() {
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//handle onmouseover
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}
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return obj;//return a object which has memory leak problem in IE6
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}
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var dButton = document.getElementsById(“d1″).appendChild(createButton());
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//skipped….
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You can use the following which doesn’t:
JAVASCRIPT:
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function createButton() {
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var obj = document.createElement(“button”);
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obj.innerHTML = “click me”;
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obj.onclick = function() {
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//handle onclick
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}
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obj.onmouseover = function() {
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//handle onmouseover
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}
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//this helps to fix the memory leak issue
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try {
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return obj;
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} finally {
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obj = null;
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}
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}
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var dButton = document.getElementsById(“d1″).appendChild(createButton());
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}
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More demos, proof of concept examples and the “finally” explanation is available on Hedger’s blog: Finally, the alternative fix for IE6’s memory leak is available
(Via Ajaxian.)
