Bug 13879 – Navigating back in a frameset sometimes reloads subframes unnecessarily

• Component: History
• Status: NEW

[Matt Perry]

Here's some repro steps:
1. Visit the above URL.
2. Click on "Menu Option A"
3. Click on "Menu Option B"
4. Select some text in the left frame.
5. Hit Back.  (You're now on page "A").  Notice the text is still selected.
6. Hit Back.  (You're now on the intro page).  Notice the text becomes unselected.  This is because the left subframe was reloaded unnecessarily.

Firefox handles this fine.

In general, when you navigate back to the history entry that marks the first time you visited a site with frames, the entire page is reloaded, instead of just the changing subframe.

[David Kilzer (:ddkilzer)]

Confirmed with a local debug build of WebKit r21848 with Safari 2.0.4 (419.3) on Mac OS X 10.4.9 (8P135).

This is NOT a regression as shipping Safari behaves the same way.

[Eric Seidel (no email)]

This is a long-known bug.  There might even be a dupe in bugzilla somewhere.  The backforward cache has code to explicitly avoid caching subframes and embeds, I can't remember the reason.  It might have something to do with plugins.

[Denis Nelubin]

Created attachment 20334 [details]
testcase

This is simple testcase for the bug.
These are JSP pages but you can easy reimplement it on PHP, for example. Server pages are used only to detect order of Safari's requests.