Memory Leak and Internet Explorer IE

Introduction

IE 6 and 7 leaks like mad, if you do not respect some basic rules to prevent memory leaks. The reason that IE leaks, is due to the fact, that IE uses 2 (or more ?) engines to handle HTML pages with javascript. This is the DOM engine and the JS engine. Both of them have a garbage collector. These two engines do not communicate properly with each other. That means that references from one engine to the other may cause a leak, because one engine is not aware of the other, that the created reference to an object is no more used (on page unload). Thus, objects containing references form the other engine remain in the memory until you close the browser. Unloading the page will not help you. These referenced objects remain there and may cause to slow down IE or to freeze if all memory is used.

The following summary should help non-professional programmers to resolve there memory leak problems. This document shows you simple ways to prevent memeory leaks in IE. There might be better solutions, but respecting the following rules will cause your code to be leak free. To explain the problems, I simplyfied a lot. This is NOT a technical documentation. If you want to understand the leak problem in deep, use the links. The code examples my not work properly. They are just used to show the theory of a subject.

Furthermore it provides you a leak free solution for using innerHTML in general