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Comment by ymolodtsov | Hacker News Reader

This is a thing I never was able to understand — why it just doesn't cache the state of the page? I'd never even try filling a complicated web form on the iPad because it can reload the webpage anytime it pleases.

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This happens to apps like Instagram, too. I could be making a post, have the photo all edited, put in 27 hashtags, then go to Safari to research another tag and... Come back and the entire app reloads, without saving the draft.

I think this is Instagram's fault, there have been lots of times where I absentmindedly leave the Instagram app for the home screen and tap on Instagram again a second later and the app reloads. My hunch is that it earns them another chance to show ads.

Facebook definitely does not care about the user returning to the same place, ever, or having any sort of continuity or coherence. I think that they do bank on confusion somehow making them more money. What I dislike is opening Instagram, and it shows me posts loaded the last time, and I want to click on them... But before I can, it reloads and shows me an entirely new semi-random selection of posts. Basically just like the Facebook news feed, you might see things that you wish to go back to, but have no hope of finding them ever again unless you have a great memory and are very dedicated.

It could also be iOS aggressively killing resource hog apps, as it tends to do. As a dev, I’ve found that the apps that I work on almost never get killed by the OS, sometimes sitting in memory for several days, because they’re quite conservative with resource use. Many of the (often needlessly) heavier apps by the “big guys” on the other hand get killed on a regular basis, even on devices with a lot of RAM.

Your device may be low on storage. I've done what you've described, and come back hours later with the app still in the same state, even with video.

It was only an iPhone 6, and sometimes I was low on storage, not other times. Storage depended on whether iCloud was actually syncing photos or not. I assumed that it was about being on low on resources, since it was an iPhone 6 running 2019 Instagram.

The iPhone 6 was a dog, unfortunately.

I was fairly satisfied with it overall, especially given did I bought it outright for a low price. However, recently the home button stopped working after less than two years.

Browsers are not editors. I think it is that simple - mentally, the model is browsers are for consumption, so who cares about state?

Contrast that with people writing editors - the mere idea of tossing the user's edits randomly is simply absurd.

Add in creepy surveillance features like javascript to capture your pre-submit edits and the other awful crap people get up to, and I write things in editors and paste in to browsers.

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