Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
Brion VIBBER wrote:
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.
not true.
Yes, true. Alas, not everyone lives up to my high standards. ;)
The recent changes page used to remain the same when you went back to it unless you manually told it to reload, but now if you use the back button to go back to a list page it reloads it from the server even if you don't particularly want it to. If I want to save time I have to right-click and say 'open in new window' all the time and it wastes my time and energy. I would be VERY much in favour of that change being made.
And don't tell me that my browser is braindead. It didn't used to do this. The wikipedia was changed, not netscape.
Netscape 4.x being braindead is not mutually exclusive with the wiki's output changing. In fact, it's the conjunction of both that causes the problem.
Currently the wiki sends out a number of cache-suppressing headers which, I believe, were introduced to keep Internet Explorer from showing you the previous version of a page after you save an edit:
Expires: 0 Cache-Control: no-cache Pragma: no-cache
Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer (at least the 5.5 I have) are so overzealous about these that they force a reload even when using the forward and back buttons. Mozilla (and presumably Netscape 6 and 7) are saner about this, and consider the page still open -- forward and back aren't page load events, they're just showing you things you've already opened again.
I'm not the one that added those, so I don't know exactly what they're meant to battle against, or under what circumstances they are necessary, or how they might be appropriately tweaked to maintain whatever alleged benefit without breaking the angry browsers.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)