Browsers still re-fetch pages when using back button
Posted 04-11-2012 at 11:42 AM by Skaperen
Browsers these days are still trying to re-fetch data when I press the infamous "back button". I think this was always a dumb idea.
No doubt that is the cause for many cases of web site double ordering. Someone backs up so they can print out the results of a previous page where they committed their order, and it causes the data to POST again, which places another order. Now days, for POST, you get a pop-up that says the browser needs to re-post the data.
NO IT DOESN'T!
And many web sites have active dynamic content that doesn't need POST, such as with query strings on the URL, or the data in the URL, or in cookies.
In the early days, I can understand web browsers choosing to NOT cache page results because disk drives were small. For at least a decade, now, this is no longer true. Browsers will hold previous content in tabs successfully, and that has never been a problem (except for some artificial limits on number of tabs by some browsers). So memory and storage is clearly not an issue up to a point which is very large.
What I think a browser SHOULD DO, or at least SHOULD allow a user option to make it do, is this. When the back button is pressed, or a drop down selection is made for any past page, just use the cached content and/or cached rendering of that content, and redisplay it WITHOUT fetching. If the user wants it re-fetched, there is already a "reload" button to do that with. A limit on the number of back pages saved is OK. Just throw away pages too far back. This limit should default to something useful like 100.
No doubt that is the cause for many cases of web site double ordering. Someone backs up so they can print out the results of a previous page where they committed their order, and it causes the data to POST again, which places another order. Now days, for POST, you get a pop-up that says the browser needs to re-post the data.
NO IT DOESN'T!
And many web sites have active dynamic content that doesn't need POST, such as with query strings on the URL, or the data in the URL, or in cookies.
In the early days, I can understand web browsers choosing to NOT cache page results because disk drives were small. For at least a decade, now, this is no longer true. Browsers will hold previous content in tabs successfully, and that has never been a problem (except for some artificial limits on number of tabs by some browsers). So memory and storage is clearly not an issue up to a point which is very large.
What I think a browser SHOULD DO, or at least SHOULD allow a user option to make it do, is this. When the back button is pressed, or a drop down selection is made for any past page, just use the cached content and/or cached rendering of that content, and redisplay it WITHOUT fetching. If the user wants it re-fetched, there is already a "reload" button to do that with. A limit on the number of back pages saved is OK. Just throw away pages too far back. This limit should default to something useful like 100.
Total Comments 2
Comments
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iirc opera didn't do such things in the past. not sure about newest versions. i guess you're talking about so-called "browser" "firefox" or there are more examples of such ugly code?
Posted 04-11-2012 at 12:27 PM by Web31337 -
I have not tried Chrome or Safari, either. But Firefox, Konqueror, and that one from Redmond do this.
Posted 04-11-2012 at 12:36 PM by Skaperen