Where is form text stored?

Question

Just curious where the text for a field on a web page is stored before you hit submit or whatever button that particular site uses. Does it just stay in your ram? I am particularly referring to firefox but wouldn't mind knowing about ie or other browsers as well. Thanks ahead of time!

Answer 1

Yes - it definitely stays local.

All programming languages offer the ability to capture form data..

I have never stopped and thought okay where is this?

We can be certain that - like right now while I am typing this, Mozilla is recording my keystrokes and creating a heap in memory - so the answer is yes, from a physical pov it's being stored in RAM, from a software point of vew it's being popped into an object at some level - I would have to be Mozilla developer to really really answer this question properly.

But it never gets converted into a cache file if that is what you are alluding to. What would be the point?

What this makes me consider is, okay could we crash a system by putting in enough text into a form box... Theoretically, yes - but man that would be ALOT of text...!!!