5 ms·

My single biggest problem on the iPad is the way Safari just randomly kills your background tabs. Filling out a web form? You'd better hope that their half-bake

My single biggest problem on the iPad is the way Safari just randomly kills your background tabs. Filling out a web form? You'd better hope that their half-baked tab state saving worked! (Spoiler alert: it probably didn't) It's particularly annoying because of the headline features of iPadOS was that you could finally use Google Docs in Safari! It's actually amazing how well it works...until you switch tabs or apps and have to wait for your entire spreadsheet to reload.

sillysaurusx 7y ago
Whoa, they do this on iPad? Is that a new iOS thing? I have 500 tabs in Safari on my iPhone. It's a nice time capsule of what I used to be reading. (500 is the cutoff limit, apparently.)
- austinhutch 7y ago
  The tab won't go away, but it will trigger a fresh http request (and thus any input in a form will disappear), I believe the behavior is the same on iOS for iPhone.
  - ljm 7y ago
    It’s identical and it’s aggressive. It’s more forgivable on the iPhone but I don’t reckon so on an iPad Pro. Oftentimes I’ve been underground and I’d go back into Safari to read a page I already had open, but it triggers a new request with no internet connection and then blows up. I would hope that at least the last open tab would be held in memory or otherwise heavily cached when the signal degraded enough to prevent a reload.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      Yep, and it's really frustrating when the tab was just a static webpage with some text you want to read. It has the iOS baked-in assumption that you always always have fast Internet access.
      - derefr 7y ago
        Putting something into your Safari Reading List saves it for offline access. If you want to read a webpage later on mobile (and it won't parse through Instapaper/Pocket for some reason), that's probably the way to go, vs. leaving it open as a tab. Though, admittedly, I never got it to work right at actually using the offline-snapshot versions of pages when I was, er, offline. Even though it clearly had them taking up space on the disk.
        danlugo92 7y ago
        Shouldn't this be handled by website developers via PWA-related tools? Think about it, if you're website is meant to work offline (and safari cannot know this), you can implement the necessary code for it to work offline (e.g. web.whatsapp.com)
        jandrese 7y ago
        For me it's often something like a manpage I have had to find via Google. The web developer isn't thinking about stuff like that because it's a pure Web 1.0 static page that normally doesn't need anything like that.
        Dylan16807 7y ago
        Expecting the page to stay open until the tab is closed isn't normally considered to be "working offline". The main point of a PWA is being able to navigate offline, not just continue to exist.
- zaphoyd 7y ago
  The parent likely means background killed in the sense that iOS fairly aggressively removes loaded web pages from memory and replaces them with a screenshot and a url. Most of your 500 tabs are likely screenshots and urls. When you select them they fetch the page from the server fresh. In most cases this is fine and frees up memory for other apps/tabs, but with web apps with local state, said state gets clobbered in a way that never happens on a desktop browser. Because it is fully automatic you can never really tell or trust that local application state will still exist if you tab away and back.
- divbzero 7y ago
  By “killing background tabs” the parent simply meant that Safari wipes loaded tabs from memory, so the tabs have to reload when selected again. However, in rare cases if you’re foolish (aka me) you might: 1. Unintentionally open a new Safari window via iPadOS multitasking. 2. Unintentionally close the original Safari window with your 400+ tabs. 3. Lose 400+ tabs permanently. I’ve learned the hard way to just use the Reading List.
TheKarateKid 7y ago
This aggressive killing of background tabs/apps is due to the iPad’s notoriously low amount of RAM. They put less than the equivalent iPhone models for a device that is supposed to be for multitasking.
- FreakyT 7y ago
  That applies to the cheapie iPads (not so much the Pros) but even then, there are times I’d rather deal with slowdowns and memory paging than actually losing my data.
  - TheKarateKid 7y ago
    The iPad Airs aren’t the cheap lineup, and they have less RAM too.

sillysaurusx 7y ago

Whoa, they do this on iPad? Is that a new iOS thing? I have 500 tabs in Safari on my iPhone. It's a nice time capsule of what I used to be reading. (500 is the cutoff limit, apparently.)

austinhutch 7y ago
The tab won't go away, but it will trigger a fresh http request (and thus any input in a form will disappear), I believe the behavior is the same on iOS for iPhone.
- ljm 7y ago
  It’s identical and it’s aggressive. It’s more forgivable on the iPhone but I don’t reckon so on an iPad Pro. Oftentimes I’ve been underground and I’d go back into Safari to read a page I already had open, but it triggers a new request with no internet connection and then blows up. I would hope that at least the last open tab would be held in memory or otherwise heavily cached when the signal degraded enough to prevent a reload.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Yep, and it's really frustrating when the tab was just a static webpage with some text you want to read. It has the iOS baked-in assumption that you always always have fast Internet access.
    - derefr 7y ago
      Putting something into your Safari Reading List saves it for offline access. If you want to read a webpage later on mobile (and it won't parse through Instapaper/Pocket for some reason), that's probably the way to go, vs. leaving it open as a tab. Though, admittedly, I never got it to work right at actually using the offline-snapshot versions of pages when I was, er, offline. Even though it clearly had them taking up space on the disk.
      - danlugo92 7y ago
        Shouldn't this be handled by website developers via PWA-related tools? Think about it, if you're website is meant to work offline (and safari cannot know this), you can implement the necessary code for it to work offline (e.g. web.whatsapp.com)
        jandrese 7y ago
        For me it's often something like a manpage I have had to find via Google. The web developer isn't thinking about stuff like that because it's a pure Web 1.0 static page that normally doesn't need anything like that.
        Dylan16807 7y ago
        Expecting the page to stay open until the tab is closed isn't normally considered to be "working offline". The main point of a PWA is being able to navigate offline, not just continue to exist.
zaphoyd 7y ago
The parent likely means background killed in the sense that iOS fairly aggressively removes loaded web pages from memory and replaces them with a screenshot and a url. Most of your 500 tabs are likely screenshots and urls. When you select them they fetch the page from the server fresh. In most cases this is fine and frees up memory for other apps/tabs, but with web apps with local state, said state gets clobbered in a way that never happens on a desktop browser. Because it is fully automatic you can never really tell or trust that local application state will still exist if you tab away and back.
divbzero 7y ago
By “killing background tabs” the parent simply meant that Safari wipes loaded tabs from memory, so the tabs have to reload when selected again. However, in rare cases if you’re foolish (aka me) you might: 1. Unintentionally open a new Safari window via iPadOS multitasking. 2. Unintentionally close the original Safari window with your 400+ tabs. 3. Lose 400+ tabs permanently. I’ve learned the hard way to just use the Reading List.

TheKarateKid 7y ago

This aggressive killing of background tabs/apps is due to the iPad’s notoriously low amount of RAM. They put less than the equivalent iPhone models for a device that is supposed to be for multitasking.

FreakyT 7y ago
That applies to the cheapie iPads (not so much the Pros) but even then, there are times I’d rather deal with slowdowns and memory paging than actually losing my data.
- TheKarateKid 7y ago
  The iPad Airs aren’t the cheap lineup, and they have less RAM too.