Why don't iPhones cache anything?

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All web browsers I have used on desktops etc. cache web pages: they generally won't reload them unless you ask them to. Particularly, they won't reload them simply because you used another app than the browser for a few minutes. (There are exceptions, like pages of sports scores that auto update.)

But on my iPhone, a device often is only tenuously connected to the Internet, Safari (and other apps, such as The Weather Channel app) attempts to reload the page I was looking at every time I return to it from another app! When, while writing a recent blog post, I was looking at a page listing the 100 largest television markets, I wanted to toggle back-and-forth between the list in Safari and my blogging app, to make sure I got all my numbers correct. Every single time I returned to the page listing TV markets, the page reloaded. And I am pretty sure they were not updating this data every couple of minutes! Aargh!

Does anyone have any idea why the iPhone behaves this way?


Comments

  1. shonk8:16 PM

    How old is your iPhone? If it's reasonably new, it certainly shouldn't be reloading the page every time you switch back to Safari, especially if you're just toggling between Safari and one other app (My iPhone – which is 2.5 years old – will happily keep 6 pages in memory as I toggle between Safari and two or three other apps).

    If your iPhone isn't particularly old and you're on iOS 7, maybe you have a zillion pages open in Safari? Or have Private Browsing turned on?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah8:32 PM

      Shonk, the page is in my list of "current" pages, and there were only a dozen or so pages in memory. And private browsing must not be, since all these pages are appearing when I look at my history, right? Nor is my phone much older than yours.

      Delete
    2. shonk9:35 PM

      My only other guess is that maybe your blogging app is eating up all the RAM on your phone (there's no swap or virtual memory, so if another app takes up all available memory, the Safari pages in memory will be flushed). But that seems fairly unlikely.

      You might consider bringing it in to an Apple store to have someone take a look at it, because what you're describing is not the expected behavior.

      Delete

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