This! I feel like Back used to get instant results all the time, and now it's almost always a big delay, which is a huge pain -- plus, it loses your position on infiniscroll and other dark patterns.
Part of it is caused by site coding, but part of it is browsers treating "back" as some species of new page load/arrival/selection.
And I know it's possible to get us back to the old days! The functionality I want is almost exactly what I would (already) get if I just opened every link in a new tab and switched back instead of triggering the back button.
(Which, incidentally, is what many sites recommend doing now for that very reason -- at least reddit.)
No. Blame browsers for not being user-agents any more. Browsers can cache websites, but only if websites tell them to do so. Users are never asked ( there is no setting ). And since websites usually don't want to be cached (for too long) browsers have to reload them ( which takes time ). Thats the reason Back-buttons are slow. Thats ( one of ) the reason(s) everybody has 100+ tabs open.
SPAs and infinite scroll are (maybe) bad, but not the cause of this problem.
Some infinite scroll-type pages consume ridiculous amounts of memory the further you scroll (and if the page disallows direct navigation to a point in history and you need to find something older that you didn't save a direct link for, you've got no choice but to scroll, and scroll, and scroll…), so limitless caching isn't quite the right answer, either…
AFAIK whether page will be restored or reloaded depends on its cache headers. I remember breaking back button in one of my projects, because users asked for it, as they expected fresh data for some reason. It was not SPA, just old server rendered website, so I disabled caching via response headers and it worked.
I found no setting. Im using an addon "ModHeader" to set the response header (for all websites) "Expires" to a date far in the future. It worked in the past, but doesn't work at the moment. Have to debug it.
Edit: Also I'm not sure that is the relevant one? Reddit sets Cache-Control to "private, max-age=3600 [seconds]", but it definitely reloads the content if I back up in less than an hour.
Part of it is caused by site coding, but part of it is browsers treating "back" as some species of new page load/arrival/selection.
And I know it's possible to get us back to the old days! The functionality I want is almost exactly what I would (already) get if I just opened every link in a new tab and switched back instead of triggering the back button.
(Which, incidentally, is what many sites recommend doing now for that very reason -- at least reddit.)