Disquismanship
February 2, 2015 10:47 AM   Subscribe

So I'm on my iPad, reading deeply into the comments on a Disquis site (e.g. AVclub). I turn away for a few moments, and the ipad sleeps. Upon return, the page (always) refreshes, and I'm back to the first page of comments, and must click More....More....More.....to get back to my page. Further interruptions mean repeating this process yet again. Is there any clever hack/workaround allowing me to see - and/or persistently save - the whole damned page?
posted by Quisp Lover to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Can't you just set the iPad to not go to sleep (I'm assuming you mean autolock mode, which can be changed in settings/general/autolock)
posted by HuronBob at 11:32 AM on February 2, 2015


Best answer: Have you tried using an alternate web browser that might handle RAM differently than Safari? Like Chrome, Mercury or Atomic?
posted by bcwinters at 12:07 PM on February 2, 2015


Twitter does basically the same thing on my phone, so I'm guessing it's an emerging technique that is not quite settled.
posted by rhizome at 1:34 PM on February 2, 2015


Chrome solved the problem for me of MeFi and other sites doing this when i go forward/back pages. Despite the fact that it's forced to use the same rendering engine as safari, it does seem to handle this kind of stuff differently.

I hate this sort of "infinite scroll" stuff with a passion, and safari sucks at it which makes it doubly bad. Chrome seems to just be a nicer skin on safari that plays nicer with this sort of stuff though(which amusingly, is usually also true on the desktop)
posted by emptythought at 4:15 PM on February 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: ---------
Can't you just set the iPad to not go to sleep?
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I often don't finish stuff in one sitting. But that aside, the refresh so aggressive that if I simply switch over to check my mail and come back, the page usually refreshes. Landing me on comments page 1.

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alternate web browser
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I see there's a Chrome for iPhone. It's a drag to have to surf different sites with different browsers (I'm locked into Safari for most browsing for ecosystem reasons), but I'll try it as a workaround, thanks.

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I hate this sort of "infinite scroll" stuff with a passion,
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Well, I didn't used to like it (in the pre-broadband days) when every slightly long page was chopped into tiny segments. But I don't understand why design practice went from too-chopped to infinite-and-clumsy. If you can't do infinite right, then just chop less, for goodness' sake....
posted by Quisp Lover at 4:49 PM on February 2, 2015


Best answer: The problem is caused by three things:

1. Apple skimping on RAM in nearly all the iPad models.
2. Safari aggressively dumping the contents of a tab when memory gets low.
3. Safari only caching the URL (and reloading that) rather than the entire state of the page.

This is commonly known as the "tab reloading" issue and there are hundreds of complaints about it since iOS 7. Your problem is that the tab gets dumped and the act of reloading the original URL takes you to the beginning of the discussions.

There are only two solutions: hope that in iOS 9 Apple finally decide to fix the issue (not great, considering their recent track record of prioritising shiny new features over fixing essential functionality) or buy an iPad Air 2 which is currently the only iPad in the portfolio that comes with 2GB of RAM.
posted by mr_silver at 1:31 AM on February 3, 2015


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