Safari reloading pages when going back

I have been experienced this issue recently, but only on heavy JavaScript pages.

Navigating back (one finger swipe left Magic Mouse) often left a blank page or froze it for 1-2 seconds when rapidly trying to scroll up/down.

I am on Safari 7 (Mavericks) and after adding the developer menu and checking "Disable Caches" it seems every thing is back to normal and even snappier! Hope this helps until further improvements.

As shallow as it sounds, I think Safari is more beautiful with swipe between pages 😉

That's an interesting answer but I'm not sure it's the problem I have on my iPad mini. My problem is hopping from one tab to another to check something and having whole blog comments or forum posts wiped. So if, for example, I write a long comment on a blog and then go to look for a link before I click post, returning to the tab with my comment in it will reload the entire page, thus losing everything I have written. On my PC, pages remain static, pretty much so I can hop from one to another.

To be honest, it's unbelievably annoying. I was hoping there might be some kind of app I could fix it with. I'm using Safari but I'm not running any extensions, I don't even know how to install them on an iPad. ;-)

Any help ideas would be hugely appreciated.

Cheers

MTM

Edited for clarity

I just chatted to a few customer representatives and their best advice to fix this issue was to reinstall os x. I'd rather not do that right now, so until there is a safari update, I'll likely go back to using chrome. The Apple workers I chat with, by the way, never seem to be aware of the issues I experience with my Apple products, or at least they're not supposed to let on that they are. Having one of them tell me they've never heard of an issue that has a thread on here with over 80 replies and 45,000 views is a bit ridiculous.

That would imply it's something "gone wrong" in Safari. It isn't. It's how Safari has always behaved and there's no persuading Apple it shouldn't behave that way. Reinstalling Safari won't cure the problem.

Christopher Rigby wrote:

"That would imply it's something "gone wrong" in Safari. It isn't. It's how Safari has always behaved and there's no persuading Apple it shouldn't behave that way. Reinstalling Safari won't cure the problem."

I've been using Safari since its inception and your statement is completely incorrect. Why do you think this thread exists? The issue is with how caching is handled in later versions compared with earlier versions. There's also every liklihood that the core OS can affect how caching is dealt with, so your previous comment may also be incorrect.

Do not waste your time reinstalling OSX. This is a Safari issue. It doesn't matter wether the OS is telling it to cache this way or Safari itself, Apple needs to change the behavior. At the very least make this a setting that we can change. It is not a bug with Safari, they designed it this way, Safari behaves this way on my Mac and both my iPhone and iPad.

Exactly Steve. That's what I was saying before. Andy Thornton may have been using Safari since inception, but I've been using it since 2006, and I can say that its behaviour compared with Firefox in doing 'Goback's, is quite different. Safari has always reloaded the page, whereas FF loads direct from cache irrespective of the latest state of the particular page, and is therefore instant.

It IS - as you say - a Safari issue, and only Apple can change its behaviour.

I think you are dismissing this as a perceived delay too easily. When I am on Reddit and click to an imgur image, then 2 finger swipe back, the old reddit page shows briefly, then the entire screen goes white. It will stay white forever, unless I do something like force a reload. However, the page is there - I can click (blindly), and click through a link to another page. So it sounds like your impression of the problem is different from what you describe. This happens every 10 minutes or so, maybe? Maybe 1 out of a few dozen back swipes. It is very annoying.

I think the perceived delay theory is correct. If you hit the back button rather than swiping back you spend an equivalent amount of time staring at the current page as the page you are going back to reloads in the background. However, what I cannot understand is why, if Safari has always worked like this, has it only recently become apparent (in my case within the last couple of weeks)? I've changed nothing, which tends to suggest someone else has. It seems likely that an update has caused the change. I wish I could change it back. It is SO annoying.

I do not think I shall be reinstalling the OS. The last time I contacted Apple about a problem was when I bought this iMac and found it had the problem, widely reported in this forum at the time, where the screen tended towards yellow on one side. In their usual helpful way they denied all knowledge and told me that the best solution would be to reload the OS. Of course this would have done no good. Obfuscation seems to be standard practice at Apple customer care and I do not think I shall be buying Apple again.

This was happening to me also. Came here, looked at the first page for solutions. Didn't help.

Even though I have no extensions installed, this worked for me:

Safari - Preferences - Extensions - Set to off OFF

Weirdly, now even if i set it to ON again, the reloading doesn't happen.

Now when I slide back, the page doesn't reload! And to think that its been 6 months that I've had this Mac and

kept up with the reloading 🙂

I have the same issue. This is funny, but when I was reading this page I wasn't logged in and when I did it and pressed back button (using track pad) the page was reloaded, but "guest" user was still shown at the top till i pressed "refresh". Looks like reload partially works from cache and partially from the Internet...

What a ******** unaddressed situation. right I am sitting here on my 6 year old PC, surfing the net is 100 times better and a breeze compared to safari on my 6 months old MacBook pro.

Apple start listening to customers. Make safari flip right back to the previous page like explorer, Mozilla and chrome already do!

I have no problem going right back to windows if this kind of unpardonable issues are being unaddressed by a company commanding that much money for products which do not deliver.

I'm afraid it isn't. None of the remedies mentioned in this thread work for me (although the Debug menu isn't quite what it used to be and has different options in it). Combine this with the lack of favicons in the Favorites bar—I have a site's favicon and no text there if I can; quicker to recognise and can fit more in—along with the bizarre address bar URL field, where any attempt to click on the URL and edit it makes it jump from centre justification to left justification, so you have to keep clicking all over the place to insert your cursor, and the fact that the current version of Firefox is dramaticcally faster than Safari, and it seems fairly obvious what you should do....

Chris

Followup to my previous post:

For me, disabling the extension, Do Not Track Plus (v2.2.0.510) fixed the problem.

I have no extensions, never did, and I have this problem. I drives me crazy.