Comments on: Broken Browsers Part One

By: Soma

Soma — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 15:50:22 +0000

dont use form posts, for back will always ask you if u want to repost, use ajax instead (or if must, post in one of the hidden iframes, though that has more limits if goes cross domain), this way you can avoid the whole back-forward issue all together.

By: Megan

Megan — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 15:38:34 +0000

There are many other reasons why it’s my favorite (I’ve paid $29.95 for it several times over the years).

By: Russ

Russ — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:39:55 +0000

I agree. The back button really needs to work much better than it does. It simply needs to retrieve the cache. I cant think it would require too much memory to do this…

By: kats

kats — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:25:06 +0000

I’m actually a browser developer, and so perhaps can offer one view from the other side of the fence. The only reason that the back button cannot be fully implemented the way you describe is the onunload javascript handler. That’s it. The thing is, the onunload is supposed to run exactly once during the lifetime of a webpage, and that is when the user leaves the webpage. If you then later go “back” to that page, it may no longer function the way you expect because the onunload handler has done a bunch of cleanup. So browser developers have a choice: they can either support onunload, or they can implement back the way you want. I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of each side, but you should know that there is at least one valid concern when it comes to implementing the perfect “back”.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:42:26 +0000

I like Chrome a lot. The problem with it is a lot of great plugins that work with Firefox and sometimes with IE don’t work at all with Chrome. Roboform being a big one. But I also use a lot of SEO plugins.

By: David D

David D — Sun, 31 May 2009 15:50:07 +0000

Okay, I think I have something for you that I just finished coding.

http://www.savefile.com/files/2122189

Remove your old back/forward buttons and use these. Each time you click back, it sets the browser in offline mode, goes back, and puts it back in online mode. Same thing for forward.

By: MicroAngelo

MicroAngelo — Wed, 27 May 2009 04:29:01 +0000

All the responses saying that “all sites should be in Flash” and positing AJAX as an answer to this problem are mad.

HTTP is essentially stateless. By design. The web would be a better place if everyone developed in a RESTful way ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restful ) using the four verbs correctly (admittedly generally using POST rather than PUT on most installs).

As someone else said, PRG ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post/Redirect/Get ) fixes many ills of form submission, but most people are too lazy to code this way.

Aside from this, Browsers still have a way to go to feel more responsive, and certainly could do more caching in the recent history to help.

+1 for Opera being about as good as it gets.

And please don’t use IE. You’ll only encourage them.

By: petekoyun

petekoyun — Mon, 25 May 2009 20:52:10 +0000

As others have already said: try Opera to solve this problem. Even after shutting down the PC for several hours Opera’s cache is usually still working when you restart! It can have many flaws but it definitely has more pros than cons.

By: John

John — Sat, 23 May 2009 01:46:04 +0000

Been using Opera and it works perfect for me.

By: Nestor

Nestor — Fri, 22 May 2009 23:53:16 +0000

Something else that needs fixing is offline browsing, I remember in the old days you could trawl through your history and reread stuff easily, even weeks and months back, but nowadays with so much dynamic content and ads and shit the feature is essentially worthless.