Fight iPhone Lag, disable comment autopreview

September 25, 2007 6:29 PM

iPhone-y pony please: a way to supress the automatic inline comment preview to mitigate typing lag.

Entering text into a plain text area like this one works pretty smoothly from my iPhone. Entering text into the comment fields on posts is miserable and laggy (which isn't good for accuracy). I strongly suspect the lag is due to the javascript that updates the live preview. Therefore I am asking for an easy way to disable the live preview. Basing it on automatic browser detection would be even cooler.

posted by Good Brain to Feature Requests at 6:29 PM (16 comments total)

Matt has an iPhone, so I wonder why he hasn't run into this.

Anyways, just hit Preview first. Then you're on page that's the same but has no live preview.
posted by smackfu at 6:32 PM on September 25, 2007

Yeah, I can block the live preview on iphones, based on user agent. I guess I always assumed the typing was slow across all textareas on all sites, but I could see the live preview being the culprit.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 6:37 PM on September 25, 2007

I thought so too, Matt. It took me a while to realize that it wasn't universal.

Smackfu, thanks for pointing that out. It satisfices.
posted by Good Brain at 7:05 PM on September 25, 2007 [3 favorites]

satisfices

awesome.
posted by boo_radley at 7:53 PM on September 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

And they said you couldn't type good on an iPhone.
posted by smackfu at 8:16 PM on September 25, 2007

While we're at it, is there any way we could get some sort of link that jumps to the end of a thread so we can check recently added comments without having to do an seemingly incessant amount of scrolling every time?
On the bright side, once a thread reaches 50 or so comments, it does provide a nice wrist workout.
posted by Dr. Zira at 8:36 PM on September 25, 2007

Dr. Zira:

If you've commented in the thread, you can use Recent Activity to view the last 10 posts in the thread.

If not, you can click on the number of new comments to skip to the bottom that way.

If you're talking about threads that you have not commented in, and who's new comment display has already passed the update to no new ones, I don't know what to tell you other than there may be a page down function for your browser you can specify.
posted by lazaruslong at 10:13 PM on September 25, 2007

I don't know what to tell you other than there may be a page down function for your browser you can specify

The page down function on the iPhone browser on long pages is endless treadmilling of your thumb.
posted by Good Brain at 10:34 PM on September 25, 2007

A silly kluge for scrolling down: add '#comment' to the thread url and it'll hop down to the comment box. That's however many keystrokes vs. however many iterations of "page down" or whatever, but, hey.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:40 PM on September 25, 2007

I often disable javascript on askMe because the live preview often (but somehow not always) makes it incredibly slow to type comments of more than a few sentences. I use Opera (as a normal desktop browser). It is not a big deal to just disable javascript but it took a while to figure out what was wrong with Metafilter/Opera.
posted by davar at 6:33 AM on September 26, 2007

If you're using Opera -- do the top-right links in the Recent Activity page work for you? I can't get them to
posted by bonaldi at 7:44 AM on September 26, 2007

Which links? The header links work for me and I don't see anything else in the top right?
posted by davar at 5:13 PM on September 26, 2007

Yeah, I can block the live preview on iphones, based on user agent. I guess I always assumed the typing was slow across all textareas on all sites, but I could see the live preview being the culprit.

I would like to be able to disable it, too, without disabling the rest of the JS features.

bonaldi: if by "top right" you mean "top left," yes, they work in Opera (on OSX). Indeed, all the clickable areas appear to work.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:01 PM on September 26, 2007

fff: no, I mean top right. Are those links only in the white-background view? I see links to MeFi, Ask, Projects and so on, right at the top right of the page. They work everywhere but on recent activity.
posted by bonaldi at 8:02 PM on September 26, 2007

huh, how about that. They only don't work in the white theme.
posted by bonaldi at 8:03 PM on September 26, 2007

Double-tapping at the top of the page to enlarge the links for the different parts of the site (mefi, askme, music, etc.) doesn't work for me. Probably due to them being so close to the edge.
posted by sourwookie at 9:57 PM on September 26, 2007