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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