The problem is that when Safari passes back the innerHTML, they give you the string with the html entities inside the tag properties decoded. In other words, when you query the innerHTML, those quote entities come back as quote literals.

If you want to re-submit them to Safari’s DOM, then, you’ll need to re-escape them using regular expressions or something. Otherwise, you get semi-unpredictable results, as you saw, as Safari tries to parse what you mean by having quote marks in the wrong places.

MSIE is only a symptom, the cause is that string concatenation is always pricy. If you search for string concatenation you find workarounds for the += problem in almost any language: Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, even Pascal :). You are running into doors if you tell me that we shouldn’t hack around MSIE’s inefficiencies, but this is a general programming problem of the memory allocation strings get in comparison to adding to an Array. Firefox has the same problem, not to the same extend, but it has.

It’s funny… += to build a string is commonplace, but because MSIE doesn’t handle it well, we are “recommended” to change our code to suit their inefficiencies? I’m all for optimizing code, and making it clean, but sometimes tweaking to enhance the MSIE experience seems over gracious for a browser that doesn’t do much to help the developers.

The correct answer, is that Microsoft should fix their code, to make += concatenation work properly, without huge memory issues. String manipulation is something that should just zip along in browsers made in 2005+. Creating an Array (temp object), then calling dozens of methods on it to push the content size… then another to join it all back into one string is just silly.