Can't seem to cleanup detached DOM elements

Question

I\'m using jquery-ui Tabs and I\'m having a problem that occurs when a tab has been removed. The tab appears to be removed, along with its content div but when you take a look a

Answer 1

Is there a reason why you use this.$el.contents().remove() instead of this.$el.empty()?

Using this.$el.empty() in that jsFiddle of yours seemed to remedy the detached NodeList.

A few notes memory profiling:

• watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3ugr9BJqIs
• Use the 3 snapshots method, 2 is not enough. What does that mean?
  • Start fresh, incognito mode and refreshed
  • Take snapshot (forced GC will happen every time you take snapshot)
  • Do something, take snapshot (gc)
  • Do something similar, take snapshot (gc)
  • Compare snapshot 2 with snapshot 1, find deltas with +
  • Choose Summary and Objects allocated between Snapshots 1 and 2 for snapshot 3
  • Look for stuff that you found comparing 2 and 1 that shouldn´t be there. These are the leeks

I have found cases where jQuery seems to leek because they save the current jQuery object in .prevObject when doing some operations like calling .add(). Maybe that call to .contents() do some funky magic.

Answer 2

So I eventually fixed this problem (quite some time ago) by doing two things:

1. Ditching jQueryUI in favor of Bootstrap

2. Changing the closeTab function (see the original jsFiddle) to the following:

   closeTab: function (e) {
       e.stopPropagation();
       e.preventDefault();
       this.model.collection.remove(this.model);
       this.close();
   }
   

In that snippet, stopPropagation and preventDefault are really what stopped this element from remaining detached (and accumulating on subsequent adds/removes) in the DOM. To summarize: this problem was created by not calling stopPropagation/preventDefault on the event object after it was triggered. I've updated the jsFiddle so that it correctly removes the tab elements and for posterity, here's a screenshot of the result:

As you can see, none of the tab elements are remaining detached after clicking the "X" to close them. The only detached elements are the ones that come from jsFiddle's interface.