Browser "Back" and "Forward" buttons :-(

poelmanc · 22 Feb 2002, 12:30 PM

As I've said before, FastMail is like the answer to my dreams! IMAP plus web-based browsing, fast and professional with no ads! I was using webbox.com before and it s*cked big time. I'm telling all my friends about it.

I've just experienced my first major frustration, though, and it has to do with the browser's "Back" button. I was composing a lengthy reply to a message when I pressed the "Back" button. (In this case it happened accidentally, the computer I'm on has one of those fancy Microsoft Intellimouse Explorers with extra buttons on the sides of the mouse and I accidentally bumped the side button which is bound to "Back", but I can imagine doing this intentionally to review the email to which I was replying, open a different message in a new window to compare, etc.) When I pressed the "Forward" button to return to my lengthy missive, I got the message "Page Expired" and could only Cancel or Refresh. Cancel did nothing, and needless to say "Refresh" caused my reply to start over, thus erasing my lengthy half-composed manifesto.

I'm no web guru, but I believe the web server can specify timeouts or valid durations for pages individually. It would eliminate much frustration if any pages that have lengthy text entry widgets were set to never expire.

Before now I had experienced similar trivial annoyances on FastMail with expired pages, like when I read a message and then press the "back" button to go back to my Inbox window and it says "expired", or when I set some forwarding rules and go "back" to the main preference page and it says "expired." But in these cases I just have to press "Refresh" and then "Retry" to get the page back - not ideal but I can live with that.

I realize there are complexity issues here - if you don't expire the pages then your server has to deal with people trying to read messages that have since been deleted or reading folders that have since been renamed, but with your IMAP-plus-web architecture my guess is you're already dealing with that as gracefully as possible anyway. Also simple-minded users might get confused by viewing out of date pages when they use the back button, but I think most FastMail users are smart enough to know when they need to manually press the "Refresh" button, which I think is preferable to your expiring the page to force them to do it. Or maybe it should be a user preference?

-- Conrad

P.S. I'm using Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows 2000 in case that matters. I hope I'm not embarrasing myself here, if there's some Internet Explorer browser option to show expired pages anyway please let me know and I apologize in advance!

P.P.S. An alternative would be to auto-save half-composed messages in the Drafts folder for such situations, but since the half-composed message is on the client rather than the server that might not be possible...

Jeremy Howard · 22 Feb 2002, 12:36 PM

Your description of the problem is spot-on. Currently if we let your browser cache the page it causes problems when you try to send. We'll get that fixed in the not-to-distant future.

We tried a workaround where anytime you clicked anywhere else, the message would be saved to your clipboard. But a bug in IE5.0 caused it to crash anytime this happened, so we had to remove the feature.

Sorry about this annoyance--it's high up on our todo list to fix. The Compose screen is the last of our screens to get a throrough code overhaul. Gradually over the last 3 years we've rewritten each of the major parts of the system to make them more reliable and maintainable, but the poor old Compose screen still has 3-year-old code. When we update this screen it will be coded such that allowing browser caching will no longer cause problems.

22 Feb 2002, 12:30 PM	#1
poelmanc Junior Member Join Date: Feb 2002 Posts: 12	Browser "Back" and "Forward" buttons :-( As I've said before, FastMail is like the answer to my dreams! IMAP plus web-based browsing, fast and professional with no ads! I was using webbox.com before and it s*cked big time. I'm telling all my friends about it. I've just experienced my first major frustration, though, and it has to do with the browser's "Back" button. I was composing a lengthy reply to a message when I pressed the "Back" button. (In this case it happened accidentally, the computer I'm on has one of those fancy Microsoft Intellimouse Explorers with extra buttons on the sides of the mouse and I accidentally bumped the side button which is bound to "Back", but I can imagine doing this intentionally to review the email to which I was replying, open a different message in a new window to compare, etc.) When I pressed the "Forward" button to return to my lengthy missive, I got the message "Page Expired" and could only Cancel or Refresh. Cancel did nothing, and needless to say "Refresh" caused my reply to start over, thus erasing my lengthy half-composed manifesto. I'm no web guru, but I believe the web server can specify timeouts or valid durations for pages individually. It would eliminate much frustration if any pages that have lengthy text entry widgets were set to never expire. Before now I had experienced similar trivial annoyances on FastMail with expired pages, like when I read a message and then press the "back" button to go back to my Inbox window and it says "expired", or when I set some forwarding rules and go "back" to the main preference page and it says "expired." But in these cases I just have to press "Refresh" and then "Retry" to get the page back - not ideal but I can live with that. I realize there are complexity issues here - if you don't expire the pages then your server has to deal with people trying to read messages that have since been deleted or reading folders that have since been renamed, but with your IMAP-plus-web architecture my guess is you're already dealing with that as gracefully as possible anyway. Also simple-minded users might get confused by viewing out of date pages when they use the back button, but I think most FastMail users are smart enough to know when they need to manually press the "Refresh" button, which I think is preferable to your expiring the page to force them to do it. Or maybe it should be a user preference? -- Conrad P.S. I'm using Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows 2000 in case that matters. I hope I'm not embarrasing myself here, if there's some Internet Explorer browser option to show expired pages anyway please let me know and I apologize in advance! P.P.S. An alternative would be to auto-save half-composed messages in the Drafts folder for such situations, but since the half-composed message is on the client rather than the server that might not be possible...

22 Feb 2002, 12:36 PM	#2
Jeremy Howard Ultimate Contributor Join Date: Sep 2001 Location: Australia Posts: 11,501	Your description of the problem is spot-on. Currently if we let your browser cache the page it causes problems when you try to send. We'll get that fixed in the not-to-distant future. We tried a workaround where anytime you clicked anywhere else, the message would be saved to your clipboard. But a bug in IE5.0 caused it to crash anytime this happened, so we had to remove the feature. Sorry about this annoyance--it's high up on our todo list to fix. The Compose screen is the last of our screens to get a throrough code overhaul. Gradually over the last 3 years we've rewritten each of the major parts of the system to make them more reliable and maintainable, but the poor old Compose screen still has 3-year-old code. When we update this screen it will be coded such that allowing browser caching will no longer cause problems.