Changing text in textarea inside of focus event crashes IE 7/8

[christopher.roush@…]

After setting a focus event on a textarea element and changing the text of that element, as soon as text is entered from keyboard input, IE 7/8 will crash.

After the focus event is finished running the below code, any additional keyboard input will cause IE to crash. It does not seem to get stuck in any loops...it crashes immediately.

$('#textarea').focus(function(){
   $(this).text("");
   $(this).css("color","#000");
});

Changing the above code block to this example seems to solve the problem.

$('#textarea').focus(function(){
   document.form.textarea.value = "";
   $(this).css("color","#000");
});

[dmethvin]

The equivalent to document.form.textarea.value = ""; is $(this).val(""); because textareas have values, not child text nodes.

[anonymous]

Is there a reason or explanation as to why it would crash IE, but work in other browsers?

[dmethvin]

Lots of invalid things don't work consistently across browsers. Use the value property of a textarea.

[anonymous]

Thanks, this worked as well. However, I logged this issue as a bug because it crashed the browser. I would expect it to fail gracefully.