Q: ios7 keeps refreshing apps after switching

Many of us here have experienced exactly what you describe and have mentioned it somewhere in these 39 pages. What you describe is certainly a failure to adequately maintain the status of a suspended app so is probably is a different aspect of the app switching problem that is the main topic of this thread.

So I think you're in the right place and thanks for logging feedback.

Folks,

Today I stumbled on a way to force Safari as well as other browsers *not* to automatically refresh the pages after switching out of the browser app into another app.  Drawback is that the relatively minor effort needed to prevent it has to be done before you switch out each and every time.  So you'll have to make it habitual, and thus this trick qualifies only as a trick, at best a work-around, but not a true fix.  Still, it does suppress this very annoying behavior.  I added it to my blog, which is a non-commerical personal blog (but nothing too personal, otherwise, I wouldn't link to it. ).  In addition, I am attempting to sell nothing on my blog and have no financial interest in Apple (well, except owning some mutual fund shares that undoubtedly have Apple stock in them), nor am I am an employee thereof.  That said, the URL is:

http://mattablog.blogspot.com/2014/03/rejoice-keeping-iphone-based-browser.html

For those blocked from personal blogs at work, etc., I will for convenience's sake simply state the action to take:

In Safari or another browser app, touch and hold on a piece of text (a single word or letter is fine), then lift your finger off the screen.  The word or letter will be selected and the familiar little pop-up that says "Copy | Define" appears.  Touch "Define" and the screen that shows the word's definition or says it couldn't find a definition pops up.  Now, do *not* touch anything else; not "Done", "Search the Web", or anything else. Now press the Home button (i.e., the one on the bottom portion of the front face panel of the iPhone with the square in it).  You will be switched back to the springboard with all your app icons and from there can do anything else you want.  Then, touch the browser icon for the browser you were in and you'll switch back into it.  The definition screen covering the browser window will still be there.  Touch "Done", and the screen drops away.  Blessedly, the open browser window(s) will *not* reload.

So you see, you must remember to do this any time you need to suppress this behavior, but after it becomes habit, all that annoying lost productivity, dropped sessions, lost text typed into input boxes, etc., will be avoidable.  I agree however that Apple really ought to fix this issue, as it makes many people very unhappy.  There is also a great feeling of helplessness around it too since it affects every browser (that I am aware of) out there, not just Safari.

Hope this helps you all; it sure has made me feel better about using the iPhone to web-surf in less that a day's time.

Matt,that worked for me the first time, but after waiting maybe a minute, away from the browser,

it didn't work....the "definition" pop up was lost and the page reloaded.  I find that if I am just away from my browser a moment, it may not always reload but anything like a couple of moments will resist in the dreaded reload and lagging....

Sorry that happened to you.  If you have a different browser on your iPhone (such as Mercury, Dolphin, etc.), did you try it on of those, too?  After opening a lot of apps in my 4S and switching around, I was able to get the non-refresh consistently in Safari and Mercury.  Wondering what may be different here... possibly the number of open browsers you have going are a factor?  Maybe if the memory get strained badly enough, the iOS will kill the 'Define' screen even if the feature is coded in such a way as to make it partial to maintaining it for the sake of the user experience.

I gather, maybe incorrectly, from your user ID that you work for Apple.  If it's possible, could you refer the inquiry to the development team that is most likely to have coded the 'Copy | Define' pop-up feature?  I am thinking that if that pop-up acts as a modal dialog that can be killed at iOS's discretion if memory constraints get too painful, then there is already logic in place to detect that condition.  Adding an option to the Settings that indicates that the user would like to be asked when this condition arises if they want to clear the in-memory browser cache to release memory so another app can be run, or cancel further attempts to open more apps until the browser is closed, would be nice.  I understand that Apple wants the iPhone to be a "just pick it up and use it" kind of device and for the most part, it is.  However when it gets to sacrificing the user experience in the process and making the user feel frustrated (and they don't really understand why), the maker of the product is in essence undermining their own goal: ease-of-use is cancelled out by apparent limitations or faults that appear to be entirely avoidable that inhibit the function of the product.  Thus ease-of-use in fact becomes not-easy-to-use.

Put another way: I have no real complaints about the iPhone except this one annoying thing that is presented by any browser employed by the user.  Surely *something* can be done to put the decision into the hands of the user rather than force him or her to wait while browser windows re-load seemingly unnecessarily.  It's understood that memory in an iPhone cannot be limitless, but letting the user know this and putting the decision of how to handle things when the limitations are reached would I am sure give the user a better sense of control over the device's behavior as well as remove this particular recurring complaint from the gripe-list.

I don't work for apple.  it's my log in AT APPLE.  that's all.

Thanks for clarifying.  I did have that happen to me today (i.e., what you described) after having opened somethng like 15 Safari browser windows.  I tried a similar test with my Mercury browser with as many tabs open and that did not change the ability of the popped-up 'Define' dialog to remain open nor the trick I uncovered to suppress the re-load action.

So my best conjecture right now is that possibly since Safari is the native browser app, it can be more controlled by the iOS than can Mercury.  Maybe then the trick works much of the time with Safari, but not *all* the time with it, depending on the state of the browser and free RAM in the phone.

One thing re Mercury is that at times it does not select text you touch on the screen.  This could be due to an HTML DOM issue with a particular page or pages, depending on what is happening behind the scenes.  I've found that with few exceptions, I can consistently select and copy text in Safari browser windows.  So between these two browsers, for my purposes, I think I can get my needs met.  Still, I hope Apple can find a way to give the user more discretionary choice in how the iOS behaves vis-a-vis Safari if it detects it needs memory currently in use by an open Safari window in the background either by Safari prefs setting, pop-up question box, or some combination of those two things and/or something else.

Update for k8atapple and others partial to Safari:

I also found that by placing Safari in its select-browser state (touch the lower-right one-square-on-top-of-the-other icon in Safari that causes the browser windows to stack tilting forward, pseudo-3D style) and then switching out to the Springboard and doing whatever, etc., then back into Safari, that also seems to work, even with a lot of browser windows and apps open.

Some web pages have Javascript that force an auto-refresh based on last date-time of retrieval which they store in their DOM, usually in a hidden field or some other place. So that can't be helped when a browser window becomes active. However lacking that, the window doesn't refresh. So in terms of getting consistently positive results when trying to suppress auto-reload when using Safari, I recommend this approach more often than the more general one I described first.

These are interesting solutions to my problems. I have been doing what I could to avoid switching apps and will have to get back to normal mode of operation to try this out. I tried the "define" dialog and it seemed to work for me. I'll have to intentionally order something off of Amazon like I did one before to test this out.

Adding my voice to this issue too. iOS 7.1, iPhone 4S and iPad 4.

It's the single most annoying bug in iOS. I've lost count of the times I've almost smashed my iPhone on the ground as I've been so infuriated.

For me it affects all apps no matter if they are recently closed or not. Maps is the worst when it refreshes and loses your directions half way through navigating. I simply can't believe it wasn't fixed in the 7.1 update.

I shall keep spamming Apple's feedback form until the problem is addressed.

DA:MAC, welcome to the crowd of shared iOS 7 misery.  It's a pretty horrible situation.  Am curious: does this happen with your iPad 4 also?

rick7: yes it does happen on iPad 4. I just tested again by opening a link in Twitter app, navigating one icon to the right to Mail app, waiting 5 seconds and then back to Twitter. Twitter refreshed and I was back to my timeline.

I had the same problem. I downloaded tabs full of webpages on Safari before I got an airplane recently so that I could read the downloaded pages after I put my iPad on airplane mode. I was looking forward to catching up on a lot of reading. But after the iPad was on airplane mode the pages tried to refresh and I got a message saying that the Internet was unavailable. So I lost my reading material.

I found a workaround. I downloaded the browser app called Mercury. I tested it by downloading tabs of webpages and then putting the ipad in airplane mode. I went to work. I came home. My reading material was still there. So I'm using Mercury on my iPad from now on.

That suggests that app developers have some control over the issue.  Maybe we should be complaining to them instead.   I've reported this behavior to Tapatalk (a forum reader app) but that was about six months ago and they hadn't heard of the problem.

Before you smash all your electronic fruit be warned that almost all devices I've used do a refresh. On mobile I first was majorly annoyed by this with my HTC One X. Sense was basically like iOS and whenever you switched back to an app once it was in the foreground all webpages would reload sucking up more data so the carriers must love this and the websites for all the extra hits.

When I tested the BlackBerry Z10 browser I didn't notice any such reloads.

Galaxy S4 chrome and stock browsers do refresh periodically but not as annoyingly as on iOs 7

Microsoft Surface 2 non pro with 2 gb memory. Internet explorer worked as desired. Pages stayed loaded without refresh. Puzzling when I go to my full laptop with 4gb ram and the full Windoze OS non RT it too refreshes whenever it wants to. Not all the time.

So our iOS 6 days are long gone now. On my iPad 3 it worked as desired and it had better memory management.

It appears that 1gb of ram is too limiting, but as you can see with all the different devices I get to test for my work all the ram in the world helps but doesn't necessarily guarantee bad memory management in the coding.

Has anyone tried safari Reading List to any degree of success?

So you're saying that this is also a problem on some Android devices and is not specific to iOS?

I went from iPhone 4S, with constant app refreshes frustrating me beyond exhaustion, to a Nexus 5, which has been multitasking flawlessly (no refreshes!) since I got it 4 months ago.

Though I guess it's not a fair comparison because the Nexus 5 has a lot more memory than iPhone 4S. For a more fair comparison, it would be interesting if someone with a Nexus 5 and an iPhone 5S would do some sort of experiment to see how they compare in terms of app refreshes.

As an aside, I am quite happy with the Nexus 5 but would also be happy to return to iOS if the upcoming iPhone 6 has completely and thoroughly solved the app refresh problem.... or maybe even if it seems solved due to the device having more memory, then they will release iOS 8 or 9 which will use even more memory and the problem will come right back?