Can you prevent the iPhone browser from reloading pages?

Question

I commute using the subway so this means 20 minute stretches of no internet.

To give me something to do, I often open a bunch of web pages, say 3 or 4 before I'm offline so I can read them while I'm without a signal.

If I check my pages just before losing a signal, they show up perfectly and the internet icon doesn't show, hence my thinking that it's not reloading when I check.

After loosing internet, sometimes my web pages will display fine, other times they try to reload.

Is there a way to have them not reload so I can read them?

Any other alternatives?

Answer 1

The behavior that you've described appears to be a limitation of the Safari mobile browser. Other users have complained about the Safari Mobile auto refresh behavior on several Apple community forum posts.

This iFans post offers some explanations and potential solutions:

This is not a feature... It's a limitation.

MobileSafari keeps website cache only in RAM, and therefore, once it runs out of RAM, it'll automatically destroy an entire page, forcing the refresh, disguising itself as an auto-refresh feature. You can only keep at most 3 pages open at any time... Even the iPhone 4 with double the amount of RAM can only keep 5 pages.

You can try a third-party browser that has offline caching, and it'll remedy the situation. Or alternatively, use the swap file mod I posted in the jailbreak forums and it should work, too.

These third-party browsers have offline page caching as far as I know:

• iCab Mobile (also supports concurrent tab, which means you can browse websites while listening to music on youtube, this is my personal favourite)
• Atomic Web Browser (many useful features, but the interface is a bit strange)
• Mercury (cool browser that looks like a shrunk version of desktop Safari)

Your choices appear to be:

• Use a jailbreak mod to increase the swap file size (hopefully will increase number of pages that can be stored)
• Use a third party browser that supports offline caching

Answer 2

Mobile Safari clears tabs from memory when it receives a low memory warning from the OS. For performance reasons, iOS doesn't do any paging to disk, so when something is moved out of memory, it's gone unless it's been saved. So the reason you have to reload pages is that other tasks on your iPhone (other apps or new browser tabs) are using memory, so Safari kicks the older tabs out of memory, and when you flip back to them, they need to be re-dowloaded.

This is system behaviour, and it can't be changed. However there are several apps that are designed to save pages for offline reading. I personally recommend Instapaper - very well designed, actively maintained by a great independent developer, and the service integrates with a lot of other apps, so you can save links from most RSS and Twitter clients, amongst other things.

The basic premise is that when you open a page you want to read later, you use a bookmarklet to save the page to Instapaper. Then open the app and it downloads a nicely formatted, text- and pictures-only version of your saved pages for reading at your convenience. It has lots of other features, including saving your position in an article and syncing it to any other Instapaper clients you use. Highly recommended.

Answer 3

I prefer ReadItLater (now called Pocket) to Instapaper, but both are good. I wish someone would write a jailbreak patch to mobile safari to enable page caching to disk, but until then, I guess I'll try mercury and icab. Thx all.

Answer 4

Take screen shots of what you want to read. You will then not have any reloading issues.

Of course, you'll have to fit all of the content of what you want to read on the screen.