A faster way to replace an element's contents in a web page

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The other day I was writing a web user interface in Javascript to view a dataset and I discovered that some calls to set innerHTML on a div element were taking over a minute (in Chrome). This line was the culprit: someDiv . innerHTML = newHTML ; Looks innocuous right? I dug a little deeper and discovered that the slow calls were only when the existing html in the div was large (~6M characters).…

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