This is not the time machine I was hoping for... April 17, 2012 7:09 PM   Subscribe

When reading Ask on my iPhone, if I use the back arrow to back out of the question to the main page, it always takes me "back" to March 9th at 730 am. Is it just me?
posted by anastasiav to Bugs at 7:09 PM (25 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite

I asked a similar question awhile back. It seems that it's an issue with the cache. I just tap the link to go to AskMe now, rather than hit the back button. I have to scroll a little more, but I'm no longer confused by old questions.
posted by Night_owl at 7:16 PM on April 17, 2012


No this happens to me too. Not always to the same date but usually about a week before the actual date. It's rather annoying. I think it's been discussed here before.
posted by peacheater at 7:16 PM on April 17, 2012


Yes, this is a bug in iOS 5 that we can't fix on this end of things. If you search around the web for "mobile safari back button cache" you'll see many people complaining about it across all kinds of sites—it's not just MetaFilter.

One potential "fix" we could implement would be disabling caching on the front page of Ask for everyone. That means the back button cache wouldn't work at all, and the page would be reloaded from scratch on using the back button. That would get annoying because folks are used to the back button being very snappy. So I think the cure would be worse than the disease in that case.

If you encounter this a lot I think the best bet is what Night_owl mentioned. Click the logo to return to the front page. That will guarantee you have the latest version of the front page, and hopefully Apple will get this back button problem fixed up soon. Here is the last thread on this topic from January.
posted by pb (staff) at 7:23 PM on April 17, 2012 [2 favorites]


I think we have the basis for a new television series of the sort which seem to be popular right now.

Our hero discovers that the back button on his cellphone web browser always takes him "back" to some previous date. He discovers that Something Very Important went awry with the flow of history on that date, and that if he follows clues provided by looking closely at the information provided by his browser while in that state, he can correct the wrong and Set Things Right Again.

I guess Kiefer Sutherland would need to play the lead, or some other star of a previous series that was overly violent and is now looking to reform his reputation with a new series.
posted by hippybear at 7:44 PM on April 17, 2012 [18 favorites]


this is a bug in iOS 5 that we can't fix on this end of things

Something similar happens on Salon when I'm reading Glenn Greenwald's columns.
posted by Trurl at 7:46 PM on April 17, 2012 [1 favorite]


Needs a groundhogday tag.
posted by eddydamascene at 8:03 PM on April 17, 2012


Strangely, I used to have this problem all the time, but it's gone away.
posted by leahwrenn at 8:14 PM on April 17, 2012


My own private little theory about this is that Apple cut corners on caching when iOS 5 came out; around that time there was a lot of grumbling about speed and battery life, and they may have decided this was a hit worth taking until users adopt newer hardware. That may not be the reason, but I do know that (a) this happens on most frequently-visited pages, on all browsers, on all devices (iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch) that are running iOS 5+, and (b) this was never a problem before iOS 5.
posted by koeselitz at 8:31 PM on April 17, 2012


hippybear"I guess Kiefer Sutherland would need to play the lead, or some other star of a previous series that was overly violent and is now looking to reform his reputation with a new series."

"Yeah, I liked working on 24 a lot, but my agent said I need to avoid being typecast, so we've been shopping a lot of 'Brand New Day' scripts."
posted by koeselitz at 8:34 PM on April 17, 2012


Remember the old behavior was when you hit the back button on any site iOS Safari would reload the page from scratch. With a decent speed connection and a text heavy site like this, it was hard to tell.

I'd rather have the old behavior back than having the cached version from 2 days ago show up. I've not heard a lot of chatter on the fanboy sites about a bug fix update to iOS 5 so this might have to wait until the all new nifty iPhone this summer/fall/etc for a fix.

The worst part for me is Safari 5.1.5 (7534.55.3) for Lion will occasionally do the same thing. I'll hit back and the page is hours/days old. It doesn't do it every time but it does it more than it should. There's nothing on Metafilter's side to fix it, but I did report the bug to Apple and maybe someday it will get fixed. Or I'll switch to Chrome full time on my Mac.
posted by birdherder at 9:11 PM on April 17, 2012


If this is bothering you and Apple doesn't fix it might I suggest an alternative browser: iCab Mobile.

It's two American dollars and worth every penny in my opinion. No caching issues, has a totally customizable "full screen mode" (which is really, really nice I use that mode exclusively) and even has support for plugins like Instapaper and Pinboard and stuff. One of my favorite apps on my phone, easily.
posted by Doleful Creature at 9:37 PM on April 17, 2012 [3 favorites]


I did report the bug to Apple and maybe someday it will get fixed. Or I'll switch to Chrome full time on my Mac.

When I really sit back and look at all the bullshit I've put up with from Safari for a while now, from the mysterious "must reload EVERY PAGE YOU HAVE LOADED IN EVERY TAB BECAUSE THIS ONE PAGE WON'T LOAD" crap to the ambiguous handling of various page scripts to the lengthy load times of pages which take less than seconds in other browsers, I often wonder why I haven't just switched to Chrome before now.

I've already taken to using Chrome to compose posts for MetaFilter that are longer than a couple of links, because I never know if everything is suddenly going to reload and get wiped out or not. Sadly, there seem to be things about Safari I like which keep me from switching. Maybe I just need to use Chrome more until I either get over that or discover that they already exist in that other browser.

Bonus points for Chrome: recently, I was composing a complex post in Chrome, and we had one of the charming transformer explosion / power outages which my small town has far too often. My UPS is old and cranky and didn't do anything to save me from immediate computer blackout. I thought I had lost everything and nearly threw up my hands and abandoned the post. But when I started up Chrome again and got a message from Post Preview here at MetaFilter that there was no data and something had gone wrong, I hit the back button on the browser, and lo! and behold!, there appeared the New Post Page, complete with everything I'd entered in before. All I had to do was Preview the post again and make a couple of refinements, and it was posted.

I doubt Safari would do the same, even if everything else about it worked fine, which it doesn't.
posted by hippybear at 9:42 PM on April 17, 2012 [1 favorite]


birdherder: "Remember the old behavior was when you hit the back button on any site iOS Safari would reload the page from scratch."

Ah, that was it - so they did this change to save data. That probably made AT&T happy, but for the rest of us it kind of sucks.
posted by koeselitz at 10:17 PM on April 17, 2012


Foxconn using cheap flux capacitors again?

I think we have the basis for a new television series of the sort which seem to be popular right now.

Wait, now like now now, or now like you just went back in time to 2005:

Tru Calling Please get Zach Galifinakis' autograph for me.
Day Break

Or back to 2000:

7 days
Daily Edition

Or 1989:

Quantum Leap

Or 1983:

Voyagers
posted by BrotherCaine at 2:14 AM on April 18, 2012


For this bug I would buy an iPhone. That reversal in time will instantly make me a year younger, always.
posted by infini at 4:02 AM on April 18, 2012


But Mr. Peabody won't that be dangerous?
posted by spitbull at 5:45 AM on April 18, 2012 [3 favorites]


Voyagers

Man, I loved that show when I was a kid.
posted by empath at 6:28 AM on April 18, 2012


But Mr. Peabody won't that be dangerous?

Quiet, you.
posted by Sys Rq at 7:06 AM on April 18, 2012 [2 favorites]


Anyway, I don't know if this has happened to anybody else, but one annoying result of this bug for me has been that, at least four times now, I've said to myself "that's totally a double post!" and clicked in to flag it only to realize that I'm looking at a post from two days ago.
posted by koeselitz at 8:37 AM on April 18, 2012


Happened to me long before iOs 5, and lasted upwards of a year until I replaced the phone. I always got the question "I would like to smoke two cigarettes a day, but can't be trusted with a full pack..." I've seen it so much I've practically got the whole thing memorized!
posted by yellowbinder at 8:59 AM on April 18, 2012


I used to have this cache problem, then I took an arrow to the knee.

{Oh crap, now my memes are flashing back a couple months!}

Seriously, though. This issue went away for me when I last updated iOS - my phone is running 5.1 (9B176) and I haven't seen this behavior since the update.
posted by m@f at 9:50 AM on April 18, 2012 [2 favorites]


Seriously, though. This issue went away for me when I last updated iOS - my phone is running 5.1 (9B176) and I haven't seen this behavior since the update.

And now that you said that, you will encounter it all the time now.

Seriously though, this has happened since at least October. There's a suggestion that you go to settings -> safari -> advanced -> find the metafilter on the list of data and then swipe across and delete it. I have no idea if this will do anything because for me the cache bug isn't consistently repeatable. Most times it works fine, other times I get the time machine.
posted by birdherder at 10:04 AM on April 18, 2012


And now that you said that, you will encounter it all the time now.

I hope not! But I'll keep an eye out. All I can offer is my anecdotal experience and that has been a complete elimination of this issue on my AT&T iPhone 4 running 5.1. YMMV.
posted by m@f at 10:17 AM on April 18, 2012


I guess Kiefer Sutherland would need to play the lead, or some other star of a previous series that was overly violent and is now looking to reform his reputation with a new series.

Or someone who was in Lost but has been unable to recapture the magic since then.

(Did Alcatraz get cancelled? I stuck with it all the way through to the finale; it didn't get better.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:48 AM on April 18, 2012


Did Alcatraz get cancelled? I stuck with it all the way through to the finale; it didn't get better.

If anything, it got worse in the finale, and was enough for me to cancel it from being viewed in my household.
posted by never used baby shoes at 2:30 PM on April 18, 2012


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