Q: Problem with safari's cache in ios 5
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Nov 11, 2011 9:44 AMby Skaelight,Here's a theory, made without empirical testing but with an observation and an assumption.
I am going to assume that the introduction of tabbed browsing on the iPad brought the software code base of Safari on iOS closer to that on OS X. One of the features you see on OS X Safari is the grid of sites you visit regularly. That feature displays a small version of the web-page of those sites at a point of time.
If I remember correctly the old method for interaction with multiple sites on iOS prior to tabbed browsing was to click on a button which gave you a grid of your currently open sites.
In each case, I am assuming that the grids use a cache to render a likeness of those sites.
What if during the introduction of tabbed browsing into the iOS ecosystem for Safari, the code elements for the grids was not merged successfully. This could result in iOS safari remembering what a page was like for the purpose of keeping 'a grid', but having no ability but not the bits necessary to refresh those cached snapshots.
The resulting behaviour would be similar to what we are experiencing. The iOS Safari experience is displaying the original page as if it was being rendered in a grid when you hit the back button; but isn't refreshing the cache.
Food for thought.
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Nov 15, 2011 9:07 AMby mr2400,I am having issues with my site working with iOS 5 as well. I tried to detail the problem in this post http://trac/storm/ticket/17113http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7988967/problems-with-page-cache-in-ios-5-saf ari-when-navigating-back. From what I can tell, all other browsers are firing the pagehide event, then the unload event, but not Safari on iOS 5, it only fires pagehide.
Message was edited by: mr2400
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Nov 17, 2011 11:20 AMby PastorOfMuppets,I beleve this issue is related, but it's existence doesn't really explain what's going on. I'm working on a webpage designed to be accessed from a shortcut added to the home screen. I've gotten Safari to clear its cache from time to time, but I can delete and recreate the home scren link, and it never seems to load new code. No matter how many times I clear Safari's internal cache, the external home screen-based link always uses the code that existed the first time it wsa created. I can delete the shortcut, and re-create it with a different name, but the old code is still prevalent.
Ugh.
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Nov 17, 2011 11:54 AMby aesculus,PastorOfMuppets: Your observations align with mine. The jury is still out if 5.01 helps at all but I can attest its still there. It makes using the native device for debugging just about useless and you cringe when you deploy a new code base because you don't know what its going to do to your users.
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Dec 6, 2011 9:14 PMby aesculus,I have done some non official testing and believe Safari with iOS5.01 may be fixed for caching if not run as a homescreen bookmark. When I bookmark a page onto the homescreen is when I have noticed the caching behavior.
We might need a few others to see if this is actually case or it just my limited testing.
I noticed that with 5.01 if I execute a web url (or homescreen webapp) it caches. If I run it putting in the url into safari or using the safari refesh it seems to be OK.
This is not an acceptable solution but just trying to hone in on what potentially might be scope of this in the hopes Apple will be understand the issue.
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Dec 7, 2011 6:56 AMby edgewise,I see the erroneous caching every day, and I'm not using home screen bookmarks. The caching error occurs when you navigate to a frequently-updated page (page A), then navigate away from it (to page B), then return to page A via the Back button. When page A is re-displayed, Safari loads a cached version from two days ago. The bug doesn't occur unless you have a two-day-old version of page A in your cache.
