I’ve just noticed this the last couple of days, and I’m not sure what’s causing it, but I’m about to go back to IE (no, not really).
Whenever I load a page on SDMB (either a thread or one of the main pages), the page will come up and I will start to scroll up or down to get to the place I want to read. Then about 2 seconds later, the page will self-refresh back to the place where it originally loaded.
If I happen to click on a link during this interval, the self-refresh takes place immediately, leading to the conclusion that the link I clicked on has jumped out of the way and is now somewhere above or below where it was when I clicked.
Is there some setting that I have accidentally changed? I swear it didn’t do this before.
That’s entirely possible, but it’s never made a difference before.
If I carefully watch the cursor while this is happening, I see the page load and the normal cursor comes up. Then the cursor changes to “hourglass mode” for a second or so and the page reloads itself.
This recently started happening to me on FireFox/Windows, too. The page isn’t “reloading” exactly, but just re-rendering. It seems to be in conjunction with the page not being all the way loaded. I think it’s the upgrade to 1.0.2 from 1.0.1 I recently did.
This has been happening with Opera V7.02, and driving me up the wall.
I’m not at home, so I don’t know if it persists in the latest version.
Sometimes a page will “reload” as many as five times before “taking,” and there are tons of “Connection closed by remote server” errors resulting in partial loads. This is only happening at the SDMB.
It drives me nuts, because I usually forget about it when I’m replying to posts. The page appears to be fully loaded (except for the icon on the tab bar, of course) and I begin typing my reply – only to have the page reload with a blank reply box.
I can’t quite hold my fingers back, so (for instance) my reply to this thread went like this:
It happens on preview, too. Reply pages always eventually load, but forum pages often need to be refreshed several times. They don’t do the “Reloading… Reloading… Reloading…” thing – they just load partially and then stop. Thread pages reload and reload. I scroll down and start reading the latest post, then yoink! scroll down and find the place again, yoink! etc.
WTF? It’s almost been annoying enough to make me open IE.
I’m an IE user and have also noticed this strange behaviour. It mostly seems to happen with some news sites.
So I don’t think it is a problem with FireFox but rather some crappy JScript embedded in some web pages, presumably to auto-refresh the page every minute or so.
I had noticed this happening to me, but it isn’t happening now. I cleared out a crapload of spyware today, including a particularly bad batch that took me a couple trips to Safe Mode to remove. I don’t know if it’s related, but it’s possible.
To find out if you have the little devils, ctrl-alt-del, and look for one or more of these in your processes:
Wtoolsa
TB_Setup
WinTools
Wsup
Wtoolss
(I had a couple others that aren’t listed at AnswersThatWork, but I seem to have blocked the memory of the beasts from my mind)
Nevermind. It just happened again, when I clicked the forum “Go” button at the bottom of the screen after posting that reply (before waiting for the page to fully load). It wasn’t particularly annoying, though; it jumped, then went back without a problem…
Hmmm … I’ve been blaming that on the hamsters … pages seem to load *almost *all the way and then seem to wait for a bit before finishing. I was assuming that it was waiting until the page finally finished loading before jumping to the intended location on the page, such as last post.
This is something else entirely. I’ve noticed a few pages with that bug – (I avoid www.m-w.com for exactly that reason.) In those cases, it is java-related and naturally cross-platform. Disabling javascript eliminates the problem.
Not so with this. It still happens with javascript disabled.
It’s the way basic HTML is being served up. I’m not an expert in the minutia of the TCP/HTTP specifications, but I think that Firefox/Opera are getting confused by some atypical server responses that the SDMB’s HTTP server is offering up, and resending POST requests a few times. (ei; a conflict between the version of the HTTP protocol that the server is running and (at least certain versions of) Mozilla and Opera. It’s really weird.
The SDMB server is also clearly getting some requests from these browsers that are bumfuzzling it, prompting it to periodically close the connection. (Sorry for the technical jargon.)
I have been having a weird problem with Firefox myself: many times, when I click a link here on the board, the page will jump to the bottom. It’s been happening consistently over the last few days, and drives me nuts. At least the link still loads as normal, but it’s annoying to have the page jump to the bottom for no particular reason. I wonder if it’s related?
I was just about to post in the board forum on exactly this! Glad it’s not just me.
Yes, keep an eye on the load bar bottom-right of the screen. The green segments build almost all the way to the end then stop just short; after quite a pause (say 30 seconds) that last bit comes down and the page is finished loading. If you start scrolling the page before that finishes, it will jump back to the original position when the loading finishes.
This is new in the last week or two, whether it’s the recent update in the board software or FF 1.03/4 I don’t know. My guess is it’s to do with an attempted fix for the old problem where when you went back to a screen on the board you always ended up at the top rather than where you were.
Update: I am at home now, and Opera V7.50 doesn’t have this problem.
I can confirm that this only started happening in the last couple of days – I had been using Opera V7.02 at my alternate since its release and it was always totally snappy and bug-free. Whatever it is, it’s new to the SDMB.