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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

bug 358 - saving web pages is incredibly slow in IE

Issue: #358
Affects: IE6, IE7, IE8

Rendering content in the browser is obviously the main goal of day to day web surfing and web application usage.

There's form interaction, games, Facebook, Mashups & Twitter updates just to name a few.

However when you get a bunch of info/data you care about you likely want to do something with it. Typically you'll want to print, save or export your content so that you have a hard copy or backup.

However exporting is only an option if the web application you are using supports that feature... and printing is a great way to waste trees... but a 500 "page" report is something better suited to be saved to a digital file. Besides maybe you want to manipulate that data in your spreadsheet program before printing it or making a PDF to share.

Alright, easy as pie... just render the page you want and choose Save as from the right click menu file menu.

Should take about a fraction of a second to save the page you are viewing (already downloaded) to an HTML file.

Well not quite! Although Firefox, Chrome, Opera & Safari all do this in milliseconds IE does not. Internet Explorer re-requests the ENTIRE file from scratch. Yes, that's right, re-downloads an EXACT DUPLICATE of your (example) 500 page report!

Needless to say this is a massive waste of bandwidth and user time as they wait for the page to be re-fetched... while staring at the already rendered copy they already have!



Known Workarounds: None. Well I suppose the more technically inclined could view the source... then CTRL+A (select all), then CTRL+C (copy), then CTRL+V (paste) and save in your text editing application of choice - but that seems awfully inconvenient when there is a save as option in the file menu.



Related Issues: None.



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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

IE always makes things challenging, harder to achieve and this again proves that why we should abandon IE(The abomination)

Anonymous said...

If the user has IE6 or IE7 then if they copy the source don't they get that messed up HTML that IE produces or do they get the true HTML source from the server?

Anonymous said...

Just use wget -mirror to save a page. Works best and is fast witgh more options to set