It’s not uncommon for me to have my IE5 open for more than 12 hours running, going constantly to different sites.
From time to time, the browser will do one of two weird things. Sometimes, it fails to “remember” where it has been and the back button will not work. Other times, the video will go bad, as if it were a TV with the horizontal hold messed up.
Is this a known bug? I’ve only ever had it happen on my work computer, but then that’s the only place that I’ll use the browser off and on continuously for so long. It also happened with IE4.something.
What happens to me is that my connection time when I switch to a new site slows down as the day goes on. If I delete my browser, then open it again, the problem usually goes away.
I have IE5 as well, and I have noticed that my “back” button doesn’t work on a lot of sites. That didn’t happen as often with IE4. I don’t know whether it’s a bug, but it sure is annoying.
Older versions of Netscape (I don’t know about newer ones) had a bad memory leak that made the program crash, usually taking Windows with it, if you ran it too long without re-starting Windows. The problem was aggravated by opening up extra windows, like the pop-up windows you get at places like Geocities and Tripod. The system would allocate a certain amount of memory for those windows, but the memory wouldn’t all be freed up when the window closed. So I’d say that, yes, browsers can get tired, although I haven’t noticed that particular problem with IE.
I’m using IE 5 and I have a problem with it not showing me a page after a while. I will open something up in a new window and nothing will load. Re-booting fixes it, but it acts like it just got tired.
If I had to venture a guess, I would say it could be a memory leak. As you use it throughout the day, it does not re-allocate memory properly. As the day wears on, you have less and less free RAM, so Windows resorts to using the swapfile more–thus, much slowness.
I use a program called Freemem Pro that takes care of re-allocating unused memory throughout the day. This is shareware and is available here. There is also a freeware version that only allows you to free up memory when you tell it to. I have used both with good luck.
There are other similar programs out there that also do the same thing. More than once, this has saved me from having to reboot as often while keeping the computer performing more normally.
While my browser also goes nuts occasionally due to a memory leak or two (they are inevitable, I think) your problem is probably something else.
Some dynamic sites disable the back button because they use fancy cgi schemes, like passing complex variables to the next page in the URL. They don’t want you to go back because the server won’t be in the same state when you try to move forward again. It goofs things up.
To see if this is your problem, look for web pages like pagename.asp instead of pagename.html. ASP and other dynamic pages tend to use this trick. The way to recover your back button: navigate to some other new site, outside the server where you are stuck. Hold down your back button until it shows your list of previously visited links. It should now be active again. Navigate back TWO or more URLs, go back to before the spot you had the problem. Take a big leap forward and two steps back, that will unfreeze your back button.
14 hours? Boy you are lucky. I get a couple hours usually. It depends on how many sites I visit because then the cache & those history things get confused, I suppose.
I don’t have any clue about the video problems Manny, but I ask about the back button problem a few days back. After repeated failed attempts to explain the problem, and someone figuring out how to operate the Microsoft Knowledge Base of User Torment[sup]TM[/sup], we got an answer.
