Is the "async" attribute/property useful if a script is dynamically added to the DOM?

Question

This question is sort of a tangent to Which browsers support <script async="async" />?.

I've seen a few scripts lately that do something like this:

var s = document.createElement('script');
s.type = 'text/javascript';
s.async = true;
s.src = 'http://www.example.com/script.js';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);

This is a common way to add a script to the DOM dynamically, which, IIRC from Steve Souders's book "Even Faster Web Sites," prompts all modern browsers to load the script asynchronously (i.e., not blocking page rendering or downloading of subsequent assets).

If I'm correct in that, does the s.async = true statement have any use? Wouldn't it be redundant, even for the browser(s) that support that property, since dynamically appended a script should already trigger asynchronous downloading?

Answer 1

The question is does s.async = true have a use for dynamically inserted scripts, or are these loaded asynchronously already. The answer is they aren't loaded asynchronously in all browsers, as explained here (thanks to Markus Olsson for the link)

script-inserted scripts execute asynchronously in IE and WebKit, but synchronously in Opera and pre-4.0 Firefox. In Firefox 4.0, the async DOM property defaults to true for script-created scripts, so the default behavior matches the behavior of IE and WebKit.

In browsers that support async but don't already default to asynchronous loading (for example, Firefox 3.6), async = true makes a difference.

(The above link confirms that async is supported in Gecko 1.9.2, the layout engine used by Firefox 3.6)