Today I found an interesting (yet frustrating) problem with a very large html form being accessed specifically through Safari on an iPad. After testing and testing the html page, I discovered the trend. The trend I noticed was slow response times when trying to type into a text input form field, but quick response from the textarea input type.

So how did I test and fix the issue? Well, it wasn’t pretty, but it seems to work. I simply changed the field types of my text input fields to textarea fields. Sure enough, when I made that change, the response times on the textarea fields were SIGNIFICANTLY faster than the fields I left as text input.

I have not installed any other browsers on this iPad so I can not confirm that this is strictly a Safari issue, but I suspect it is. Hopefully this bit of information will be useful to someone one out there trying to improve performance on a bloated html form being accessed through an iPad.