It has nothing to do with how brain dead your browser is, but how its preferences are set.  I can set IE to refresh a page every time I come to it, to only refresh once in a session, or to refresh whenever content is change.

Zoe

 Brion VIBBER <brion@pobox.com> wrote:

Erik Zachte wrote:
> This is a repost in plain readable ascii.
>
> I wonder how much web bandwidth and server processing power is consumed
> by diligent wikipedians browing the list of 'recent changes', checking
> an article and returning to the list by pressing the back button, thus
> generating a new request to the database, over and over again.

They should use a browser that's not so brain-dead that it can't tell
that the forward and back buttons are for zipping through pages that are
already open and should not be loaded all over again.