Safari reloads a tab when I switch back to it

This happens because Safari tries to minimize memory usage. It reassigns memory to the current page, which may involve scrapping the other tabs from memory as it sees fit. So when you return to the previous tabs, it has to reload it again.

I am annoyed with the same problem.

Example:
This was e.g. very frustrating when I was outside my home country (Sweden) a couple of weeks ago. There (in London) I was charged 40 SEK (about 7 US$) per downloaded megabyte. I downloaded a big Excel file (maybe 2 MB) to my iPhone. Since the Excel file contained information that I wanted to access repeatedly during my journey I left it open in a Safari window while browsing elsewhere. When I returned to the Excel file it often started to reload from scratch, which cost me not only money but also a lot of time (and when my connection was bad I wasn't able to view it at all!)

It's certainly irritating to lose data that you thought you had put in a safe place. This must be a bug, right? And I trust Apple will take care of it in one of the next releases!

(I am otherwise an extremely happy iPhone user!)

Yup, I feel like the above posts! sometimes I just like to have some page available to refer to. But seeing the reasoning behind this:

hey apple, how about giving us a setting so we can choose whether we would like it to refresh automatically or if we would like to minimise memory usage?

Round wrote:
"This happens because Safari tries to minimize memory usage."

But surely the whole point with being able to have eight pages open simultaneously on the iPhone is that they should be - well - open simultaneously and not disappear if you move to another page.

Imagine what it would be like if the same thing happened on your Mac; if whenever you went back to a page that you had left open in an earlier window it would start to re-load...

I can see your point about minimising memory usage, Round, but I refuse to believe this is how Apple intended it to work! (I do think that is the reason why they have limited the number of pages to eight though.) I am convinced it is a bug and my guess is that it will be fixed in iPhone OS 2.1 scheduled to be available on Friday. Steve Jobs said in an interview (see http://www.cnbc.com/id/26628547/site/14081545?__source=yahoo%7Cheadline%7Cquote% 7Ctext%7C&par=yahoo ) yesterday that the 2.1 update fixes "just a tonne of those bugs" and this should be one of them.

Thanks in advance, Apple!

Nope. This bug is still in there although I have now upgraded to 2.1. I suppose we will have to wait for a later release. Maybe it will be out for Christmas. Keep fixing those bugs, Apple! (And especially this one since it is particularly annoying!)

It has to be said though that Rome wasn't built on one day and the general progress achieved by Apple with the iPhone is nevertheless fantastic!

Not only does that happen, but another annoying things happens. If I have two pages open and close one of them, the remaining page not only reloads, but sometimes loads the page I just closed and not the one that had previously been displayed on that page. I have to go into the History folder to navigate back to the page I wanted.

Same problem, not fixed in 2.1, this is so annoying. I doubt this is a memory issue, as this happens even when i load very tiny pages, like a personal page which holds very very little html.... I hope that Apple is listening:)

Yes just got an iphone for my girlfriens what a nightmare! took 5 hours of itunes setup/download/install to get it working at all! (they dont tell you that in the shop) - the reason the pages relaod when using this pathetic browser is so that you get charged more money from the service provider wihch then gets shared to apple!

To minimize memory (and battery) usage is to clear a tab cache from the memory when another tab is using up more memory. Think: Would you rather have to reload ALL tabs again when Safari boots you out due to high memory usage or would you rather go to a tab and let it reload?

Yes.. I am also facing both of this frustrating problems... page reloads and after reload back button history is lost....

there are many ways to save memory usage and even they can use their hard drive space to store these pages temporarily when they are minimized... re-loading them again each time is really not a good solution to this problem...

It's really nice phone but they need to fix these problems before this phone becomes outdated 😉

I agree this is very annoying. Even if it is to save memory the fact that you cannot view the same page without having to wait for it to reload is quite frustrating. Especially when you have page you wanted to show someone later and if you don't have service you can't view the page. UGH! Also I am tired of safari crashing. Safari crashes way too often please apple fix your safari application it is one of the most important and it lacks quality. Safari is one of the main reasons people buy this phone. You should be able to go back to pages without a refresh and you should be able to search and browse safari without worrying about it crashing.

I also find this decision (forcing Safari to reload pages to save memory) to make Safari much less usable. I would like to be able to load a few pages and then view them when I am offline on my iPod Touch 2G. Once I leave home, those pages are unavailable now. What's the point of having the extra pages (I won't call them tabs) available if you can't switch to them and see them.

I also miss a key element of functionality from the desktop version of Safari-- the ability to load a set of web pages with one click. I use this all the time on my MacBook, but can't do it on the mobile version of Safari.

Attempting to reduce memory usage does not have to result in scrapping tab state. The iPhone 3G comes with a minimum of 8GB of flash memory which could be trivially used for paging out RAM memory consumed by tab state in exactly the same way desktop systems have implemented virtual memory using disk space since the 80's.

This would result in a few milliseconds of delay as the tab state is paged back in from flash, but certainly not entire loss of state.

FIXED!

I just downloaded iPhone OS 2.2 and it seems that the problem has been solved. I can now have several pages open simultaneously in Safari and go back to visit them without having to reload them from scratch. And I can quit Safari and the pages will still be there when I come back. No reload needed.

I want to be the first to say thanks! An incredible phone just got even better. And the street view in Google Maps is spectacular! I have already seen some great 360 degree (more actually since I can look up towards the sky and down as well) views Congratulations on getting that out a month before Christmas! I think it's the kind of feature that makes people talk about the iPhone.

(There still seems to be some work to be done regarding Safari stability though. It has already crashed three times since I did the upgrade an hour ago... Keep at it, Apple!)

hboy wrote:
FIXED!

I just downloaded iPhone OS 2.2 and it seems that the problem has been solved. I can now have several pages open simultaneously in Safari and go back to visit them without having to reload them from scratch. And I can quit Safari and the pages will still be there when I come back. No reload needed.

Shame on us for thanking Apple. Glitches like these are what you'd expect to see in an early beta release of a product.

Apple should be apologizing to us for still having them in their browser after 18 months...