Now that the Open-FF Browser is live and used by many, I’ve run into a odd difficulty.  I have based a lot of the “informal” search capabilities of the browser on a table-based element called “iTables.”  This is a python wrapper around the javascript package called “DataTables.”  I have found both to be extremely useful and they made search within a static web space very effective.

However, iTables recently added a lot functionality to its package (some of which I use) and it is now in version 2.0.  In the process of this change, the Search function is less responsive.    That is, when the displayed table is greater than about 10,000 records, Search grinds to a halt or at least a very slow crawl.

Most of the browser tables are shorter than that, but for some — Texas or even, Weld County, Colorado, for instance — the search function is useless or worse, it crashes the browser.

It turns out that earlier versions of iTables were similarly limited (as expected) but that the maximum size of the table I could search was within the browser table sizes.  But no more.

This is forcing me to think about new ways of providing search functionality to users.  I believe I may have to move some searches to Colab notebooks or perhaps even look into Bigquery-type interfaces.   The Browser has always been based on a static website model, for simplicity sake, and I’m not sure which new path to take.