Why is the dictionary shortcut unreliable using Chrome?

Question

When using the dictionary lookup shortcut Ctrl + Cmd + D when using Chrome it works for some websites but not for others.

Does this have to do with Chrome itself or is it due to the fact that some websites are using Javascript and this is affecting the shortcut?

Answer 1

This bug is known to the Chrome developers and has been filed under...

Issue 90461: Dictionary keyboard shortcut doesn't work in Lion

Basically the problems are timing issues for some websites which take too long to respond to information needed to show the dictionary.

This is what resek@chromium.org says:

There's likely not much that we can do here. We have to block the UI thread to implement this feature, which is bad and so that's done on a timeout. If the web page takes too long to respond for the information we need to display the popup, we give up and unblock the UI. If we didn't do this, Chrome would look like it's hung, waiting on the web page to respond.

We collect timing information about this, and most pages succeed well below the timeout, but there's also some class of pages that do not respond in time (more than 1500ms, which is what starts to be perceived as sluggish/hung).