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Long-standing Safari glitch/bug since iPhone release

C

CaptSaltyJack

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 28, 2007
351
1
Again, I need to bring this up, since we're at firmware 2.1 now, and this is still unresolved.

You're surfing about on your iPhone, and you click a link that opens a new page (I'll call them "tabs" from now on to avoid confusion). You surf on there for a bit, then close that tab, and Safari zooms you back to the previous tab you were on but BLANKS IT OUT and reloads it, potentially losing any data you had on there.

Apple: WTF? How could you NOT notice this problem, and how could you NOT fix it by now?
 
Small White Car said:
Ok, so you're expecting Apple to sneak into your house at night, open your iPhone, and put in some more RAM?

Frankly, I find that a bit creepy!
Click to expand...

Well, no..but I'd expect a little better memory management. The iPhone has 512MB of RAM, so RAM is no excuse. My Linux box has 512MB RAM and I have no problem with multi-tabbed browsing (and it never digs into swap memory).
 
CaptSaltyJack said:
Well, no..but I'd expect a little better memory management.
Click to expand...

Well, explain how.

When it runs out of memory, what do you want to happen?

I guess they could start taking away flash-drive space to write to, but I imagine people would get annoyed if their iPhones start reporting even less space available for songs and games than it did the day before.
 
Small White Car said:
Well, explain how.

When it runs out of memory, what do you want to happen?

I guess they could start taking away flash-drive space to write to, but I imagine people would get annoyed if their iPhones start reporting even less space available for songs and games than it did the day before.
Click to expand...

See my above edit. 512MB RAM should be enough. This web page I'm looking at right now, as I type this, is 288KB total (uncompressed), including all images, scripts, CSS. Are you saying if I open a new tab, and surf on that page and it's eating up, say, 350KB, that the iPhone is having trouble keeping the other 288KB web page in memory?! The two pages are only eating up 638KB RAM total.

I just don't get it. Maybe I'm missing something.
 
CaptSaltyJack said:
See my above edit. 512MB RAM should be enough. This web page I'm looking at right now, as I type this, is 288KB total (uncompressed), including all images, scripts, CSS. Are you saying if I open a new tab, and surf on that page and it's eating up, say, 350KB, that the iPhone is having trouble keeping the other 288KB web page in memory?! The two pages are only eating up 638KB RAM total.

I just don't get it. Maybe I'm missing something.
Click to expand...

The iPhone has 128MB of RAM - not 512MB....

Not that that doesn't mean that Safari shouldn't be able to handle page loads as you've described correctly.. :)
 
Oh, crap, only 128MB?

I just looked it up and verified. 128MB RAM, 11MB reserved for video, and who knows how much the OS eats up. But still, let's say you have five web pages open, all of them heavy hitters (450KB each). That's only 2.3MB!
 
The apparent use of only RAM for cache is one reason to view the mobile versions of web pages... they use far less memory. (I'm a big fan of at least not sending a huge picture down to a device that can't display it.)

That aside, it's not the reloading that annoys me so much. It's when it goes back to the first page and has lost its history !

A page crashes or closes and bam you're back at the first page, but that first page can no longer go back to its previous pages.

Especially after working my way down through some links, and then losing my way back...
 
This is a HUGE peeve of mine, one that I find far more annoying because it's not like a game or some other program is taking up the RAM...if RAM were at least being used for multitasking it would make more sense, but it's not being asked to do anything besides keep a few web pages open and run the usual background processes.

Then again, maybe that's why there's no multi-tasking. Then we'd REALLY have safari issues.
 
Does it really reload the pages when it runs out of ram or is there a set amount of time? I know I have seen this happen a lot when I leave a few pages open overnight, but never when I am actually using the phone.
 
NeoMayhem said:
Does it really reload the pages when it runs out of ram or is there a set amount of time? I know I have seen this happen a lot when I leave a few pages open overnight, but never when I am actually using the phone.
Click to expand...

if it crashes or there's a few pages open it sometimes reloads. There's no rhyme or reason for it.
 
I don't think the iPhone needs more ram to do what you're asking. I've never had it happen to me yet, but if I were trying to do some multitasking I would probably be pretty peeved. It sounds more like a programming glitch than a RAM issue to me. Whether or not the iPhone reloads the page when you open it, the page is theoretically still in the background while you're surfing the other one. Also, it will only sometimes reload one tab or another if you have two tabs open and constantly switch back and forth. From doing it about 20 times now, it seems to me that if you're viewing a page and you're zoomed in, if you then click the tab button and go to another tab with a preloaded webpage, it will refresh the page more often... but again, not all the time (maybe 1 in every 20 times). Sounds like software to me, not RAM.
 
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