"n items remaining" with Internet Explorer 8 fallback mechanism

[simonberube]

With Internet Explorer 8, the HTC fallback mechanism causes a lengthy "N items remaining" countdown in the status bar. The number corresponds to the amount of tags on the page. In my case, it is an admittedly large amount, at 770. It takes minutes before livequery is triggered, long after it should have. This happens even when a livequery isn't set.

With all modern browsers I tested, this plugin works very well. I really hope to be able to use it. It's very unfortunate to have to support Internet Explorer 8, but it is used on every machine at our large institution.

[simonberube]

For what it's worth, here's a potential workaround. Apparently there's a known bug in Internet Explorer 8 and prior versions that causes HTC files to download or reload from cache for each and every matching tag.

The following line in jquery.livequery.js can be modified for performance. The selector body * can be changed to something more precise like #id *.

$('head').append('<style>body *{behavior:url('+$.livequery.htcPath+')}</style>');

So my question is whether the selector body * can be made to match the livequery selector to improve performance.