iOS 7 Safari: OS locks up for 4 seconds when clicking/focusing on a HTML input

Question

UPDATE: The issue seems to stem from having many select elements on a page. How random is that?

So here\'s the issue. On iOS 7 Safari, when tapping

Answer 1

We had the same or a similar problem at my company. Whenever we displayed a large number of drop down lists and then a user clicked on a drop down, IOS 7 would freeze the page for a minute or two. After it unfroze, everything would work properly from that point forward.

This affected all input types. The large number of drop downs were actually hidden on first load - the user would initiate the display of the drop downs. Until the drop downs were displayed - everything would work fine. As soon as they were displayed, the next input click, even an input that had been working properly, now would cause the browser to freeze.

As others have noted, it seems that IOS 7 has a problem when parsing the visible inputs in the DOM after the user first interacts with an input. When the number and/or complexity of the elements/options/DOM are higher, the freeze is more pronounced.

Because it always froze on the initial user interaction, we decided to initiate a hidden user action as soon as we displayed the list of drop downs. We created a transparent button (it could not be hidden - it had to be "displayed") and initiated a click on it as soon as the user opened the drop down list. We thought that this would make IOS start parsing the DOM quicker, but found that it actually fixed the problem completely.

Answer 2

have you tried to turn off "Password & Autofill" > "Credit Cards" into Safari settings ? After this operation it works fine. This isn't a final solution but maybe the problem's reason on iOS.

Answer 3

For me, this issue was being caused by user inputs being hidden on the page with display:none.

The workaround I used: instead of hiding inputs with display:none, I used jQuery's detach() method on document ready to 'hide' all the user inputs that were not being used. Then append() the inputs when they were needed.

That way no inputs had display:none on when the page was first loaded and so no delay occurred on the initial user interaction.

Answer 4

It happens not only in iOS but in safari 7 for MAC OS (Maverics) too, I have found that the problem happens when you use a lot of div tags to contain inputs (or selects) within a form:

<div> <select>...</select> </div>
<div> <select>...</select> </div>
...

I changed the layout of my selects to use ul/li and fieldsets instead of divs and the freezze time was reduced drastically.

<ul>
   <li><select>...</select></div>
   <li><select>...</select></div>
</ul>

Here are two examples in jsfiddle:

freezze for 5 seconds

http://jsfiddle.net/k3j5v/5/

freeze for 1 second

http://jsfiddle.net/k3j5v/6/

I hope it might help someone

Answer 5

I have encountered this problem as well since I noticed many people are still having a problem with this I thought I'd put my solution.

Basically my solution is server side hiding of elements. My page is ASP.NET so I wrapped my divs with the inputs with Panels and set these panels as Visible false. This way if I click on an input the safari can't see all the other controls since they are hidden server side.

Of course if you want to make this work a little like clientside jquery you'll need automatic postback and an updatepanel somewhere. This solution requires an effort but still its better than actually trying to fix a safari bug.

Hope this helps.

Answer 6

(There are some somewhat-effective solutions, see near the end of the list)

At my company we are also suffering from this. We filed an issue with Apple but have heard mum.

Here are some interesting jsfiddles to help illustrate some of the issues, it definitely seems to revolve around the number of hidden fields, and textareas do not seem to be affected.

From debugging efforts, my guess is that there is some functionality trying to detect if an input is a credit card or phone number or some special kind which seems to cause the locking behavior. This is just one hypothesis though..

Summary:

On a page with a form containing named input elements inside containers that are marked "display: none", the first press on an input in that form has a very noticeable delay (20sec-2min) between the keyboard coming up and the input being focused. This prevents users from using our web app due to the enormous time spent with the ui frozen waiting for the keyboard to respond. We have debugged it in various scenarios to try and discern what is going on, and it appears to be from a change in how iOS7 parses the DOM versus how it did on iOS6, which has none of these issues.

From debugging within Safari's Inspector with the iPad connected, we found that iOS7 provides much more information about the (program)'s activities, to the point that we found that _CollectFormMetaData is the parent of the problem. Searching for meta data causes massive churn that increases more than linearly along with the number of hidden containers containing inputs. We found that _isVisible and _isRenderedFormElement are called far more than they reasonably should be. Additionally, if it helps, we found some detection functions relating to credit cards and address books were large time consumers.

Here are some jsFiddles for illustration. Please view them in Safari on an iPad running iOS6 and then on an iPad running iOS7:

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/20/ - Runs fine on both

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/21/ - Just noticeable delay on iOS 7

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/22/ - More noticeable delay on iOS 7

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/29/ - VERY noticeable delay on iOS 7

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/30/ - Same as 29 but with none hidden - no delay on iOS 7

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/38/ - Same as 29 but further exacerbated

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/39/ - 99 hidden inputs, one visible, one separately visible

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/40/ - 99 hidden textareas, one visible, one separately visible

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/41/ - 99 hidden inputs, one visible, one separately visible, all with the autocomplete="off" attribute

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/42/ - 99 hidden inputs, one visible, one separately visible. Hidden by position absolute and left instead of display.

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/63/ - Same as gUDvL/43/ but with autocomplete, autocorrect, autocapitalize, and spellcheck off

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/65/ - Same as gUDvL/63/ but with cleaned up indentation (seems slower on iPad)

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/66/ - Same as gUDvL/65/ but with display none via css again instead of DOMReady jQuery

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/67/ - Same as gUDvL/66/ but with TedGrav's focus/blur technique

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/68/ - Same as gUDvL/66/ but with css driven text-indent instead of display:block again (noticeable improvement - reduction to 2-3 secs for initial focus)

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/69/ - Same as gUDvL/68/ but with TedGrav's focus/blur re-added

http://jsfiddle.net/gUDvL/71/ - Same as gUDvL/66/ but with js adding a legend tag before each input. (noticeable improvement - reduction to 2-3 secs for initial focus)

<input type="text" autocomplete="off" /> (links to jsfiddle.net must be accompanied by code..)

(We should note that having the iPad connected to a Mac with Safari's debugger engaged dramatically emphasizes the delays.)

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Load any of the above jsfiddles on the iPad
2. Press an input to gain focus
3. Watch screen until you can type

Expected Results:

Expect to be able to type as soon as the keyboard pops up

Actual Results:

Watch the keyboard pop up and the screen freeze, unable to scroll or interact with Safari for a duration. After the duration, focus is given as expected. From then on no further freezes are experienced when focusing on inputs.

tl;dr technique summary

So overall there are a couple proposed fixes from various answers:

• Don't hide the divs with display: none - use something like text-indent
• Short circuit Apple's metadata scanning logic - many form tags or legend tags seem to do the trick
• Auto focus/blur - Did not work for me but two people reported it did

Related threads at Apple:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5468360