Brady Eidson (09/09): @randalfarmer It would...

WebKit Page Cache II – The unload Event

on Surfin' Safari from 23 weeks ago

@randalfarmer
It would stink if you had to take some action to disable the page cache full-time when you only really want it disabled in this one edge case. As mentioned in the post, developers should only install unload handlers when they actually need them to be installed. Do you install an unload handler full-time, or do you install it only in onsubmit?

If there were some other programatic way to disable the PageCache, that would still be desirable to the unload handler. Semantically, the “unload handler” and “I want to disable the PageCache!” are two completely different things.

Opera invented “history.navigationMode” for this reason. We might consider implementing that (https://webkit.org/b/29739) but I would shudder if developers just started flipping the switch at page load and left it on the whole time!

Of course, maybe that wouldn’t be much different than the situation today…