It turns out our cleverness trying to make this fast defeated us. Doing the simple thing turns out to be faster on both IE and FF for all reasonable values I can measure. Review by: bobv (postmortem) git-svn-id: https://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/trunk@1684 8db76d5a-ed1c-0410-87a9-c151d255dfc7