how many characters are possible in an input field in html?

Question

What is the "natural" number of allowed characters in an input field in html?

thanks a lot

addition due to the comments

i don't need to send it to the server via post or get. i am going to parse the string via JS.

So if the input is unlimited like @sAc says brings me to two further questions:

1. What is the longest String JS can handle?
2. what is the lowest amount of allowed characters for an input in common browsers?(which would be my limit than)

Answer 1

Firefox 3.6.6 on my 32 bit Win 7 machine becomes slow after 1,000,000 characters and totally freezes after 4,000,000.

Chrome crashes somewhere after 8,000,000.

IE8 crashes somewhere after 8,000,000.

Safari crashes somewhere after 2,000,000.

In my testing Chrome/IE8/Safari don't slow down as the size goes up the way Firefox does.