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Comment by samuelfekete | Hacker News Reader

Does it save the content of open tabs?

This is my number one frustration with existing iOS browsers - when I come back to tabs without an internet connection everything is gone.

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All iOS browsers just use some webview under the hood. I doubt they have any control at all over this extremely irritating behavior.

Buy why can't they store page cache as local data and continue to use webview to open it?

It is likely the OS that is clearing those tabs from memory. The app may not get any notifications. IOS does not have virtual memory that can be saved to storage and restores on request. IPadOS does now have that on the newer M1 processor versions. They also have 8GB of RAM so they are less likely to need to purge or swap.

Still not clear why the app can't save the page itself to storage on every page load, then let OS clear the memory and not notify anyone, then if it's purged, reload from local file

That sounds like the app would need to implement their own RAM paging and that is a complicated and error prone endeavor and likely not worth the effort for he developer. I don't even know if an iOS app would have the system hooks to be able to do it.

why not just save the page as html? Isn't that what official Safari does with the reading list?

Pages can rewrite themselves at any time.

so? having something good most of the time beats having nothing all of the time

Because it's some opaque component, and it's the only thing you can use on iOS. Firefox and chrome are just chrome/shells around safari's engine and all suffer from this problem.

It should remember the scroll position, and the content of <input> and <textarea> tags.

Does it re-request contents when it reload tabs after the app is suspended? Safari makes it very difficult to read content later if you don’t have service.

It does. Not sure WebKit has an easy solution for that specific scenario at the moment, besides saving a web archive to disk.

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