1400765 - Option to not refresh page unless explicitly requested

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for iOS :: Browser, defect)

Description

[Ryan]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.10; rv:55.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/55.0
Build ID: 20170824053838

Steps to reproduce:

1. Load a web page, either from the public internet or locally.

2. Lock phone and wait several hours.  (E.g. go to sleep)

3. Unlock phone and try to view the page without refreshing.

4. The page is refreshed automatically without hitting Refresh


Actual results:

The page is refreshed automatically without hitting Refresh.

In some cases, the information / interface I needed is no longer there,
for example, if I was viewing a page by a web server I am no longer
connected to.


Expected results:

Ideally, I'd love for the Refresh button to behave just the same as in regular Firefox.

If this is the intended default behavior on mobile, I'd at least like an option or setting to disable this automatic refreshing, and behave the same as the desktop version of Firefox.

Thanks!

Comment 1

[Ryan]

Hi Simon,

I couldn't tell what your comment "tracking-fxios: --- → ?" means.  Do you need any more information from me to properly categorize this request?

Thanks,
Ryan

Comment 2

[Simon Basca [:SimonB]]

Hi Ryan, 

The "tracking-fxios: --- → ?" is a flag so that we can discuss this issue with the rest of the iOS team in our triage meeting and see what further action can be taken.

Comment 3

[Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc]]

The app is getting closed in the background after remaining idle for a certain time period. This is the same behavior as Safari and all other iOS apps. The page is not "refreshing", it is simply loading from the app having been started up a second time.

Comment 4

[Ryan]

Hi Justin, thanks for your comment.  However, not all iOS browsers behave this way.  For example, the Dolphin browser does not do this.  Perhaps as you say, the app is being closed in the background, and therefore Dolphin saves an explicit local cache of the pages so that it doesn't have to re-request it.

I understand that this may be a slightly larger feature request if a local cache is required.   However, this issue is still important to me and has real usability implications for me and others who use HTML/Javascript interfaces to store local data when not connected to a web server, and then re-join the web server later to POST the data.

I hope you'll consider re-opening.

I'm looking into working around this by altering the web application I use to use Cache Manifest or ServiceWorkers, I'm running in to problems with both directions.

Have a great day!
Ryan

Comment 5

[Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc]]

Hmm... Its possible that Dolphin is using UIWebView which I believe supports state restoration:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiwebview#1652695

I'm not sure if this is possible with WKWebView though.

Stefan, do you know anything about this?

Comment 6

[Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc]]

I'm re-closing this since we're using WKWebView which does not have any API for state restoration like UIWebView does making this impossible to accomplish.

Comment 7

[Ryan]

Ok Justin, thanks for looking into it!