I tried to make the title clear, but it really looks stupid.
Anyway, after a re-install of XP, there’s all this tweaking and one of them isn’t working. If I’m browsing GQ, all the 50 threads don’t fit in on the screen, so I scroll down. If I click a thread, read it and then hit ‘back’ it used to be that I got back to the scrolled position. Now, for some reason, hitting ‘back’ means I return to the top of the page. I don’t want that.
Where’s the setting to avoid this happening?
(Advice along the line of “use FF” will not be helpful)
Have you tried hunting around in the settings? I don’t have IE6 on any of my computers anymore, so I can’t check it myself.
Then again, in my experience the “navigate back to scrolled position” feature is dicey on every browser, and seems to work on some sites but not others fairly consistently. For example: I’m using Firefox 2, and navigating to some GQ thread on the SDMB and then hitting “back” returns me to the scrolled position, but at another message board I frequent, a similar action always reloads the index page at the top.
Side note: if “use FF” isn’t a helpful answer, is upgrading to IE7 an option? I’d definitely recommend it over IE6…
I could at least explain that one. It has to do with the way, web pages are delivered (HTTP) and is actually one of those “not a bug but a feature” thingies. (To a certain extend at least)
When you surf the web, your browser can save local copies of the pages you visited, so it doesn’t need to download them twice if you want to see a page again later. However, that’s not practical with all pages. Some pages, like forums, change so fast that the saved copies would be worthless in a few seconds. That’s why web sites can send a HTTP directive that disables caching for a page and forces the browser to re-download it every time you want to see it.
Getting to the point, now if you hit the back button and the page you go back to was allowed to be cached, the browser will show it lightning-fast and will remember your scrolling position. But if it was not, the browser will have to download it again. And because the page could have changed in the meantime, your scrolling position could be really anywhere now, so it gets reset.
What’s the conclusion of all this? Well, mostly that you can’t do much about it because it’s more than a simple bug. But maybe it helps at least to know why 
The bigger question is of course why just registered and wrote a three paragraph text about an obscure scrolling quirk. I think I’ll just blame the awesome forum and the really late time around here though.
Try adjusting your cache settings.
OK, I’m getting somewhere. Now I know why it’s happening.
It never happened before, though. I’ve checked all settings in IE, I fiddled with the settings for temporary internet files, I can’t find settings for cache in IE6, so maybe it’s something with XP that is forcing IE to do this, and I’ll check that next.
I will change to FF after the next step in the upgrade, as for IE7, I’ll stick with the enemy I know.
Phil127, I thought about the caching issue, but I wasn’t sure if that would definitely be the culprit, since I seem to recall my browser repositioning the scrollbar even on uncached pages - the scrolling happened after the page finished loading. Or maybe I’m misremembering, and there was actually an anchor in the location in the events I’m recalling. I’m too lazy to test it anyway. 
In any case, I did take a look at the HTML for my other forum’s indexes - they do indeed include a “no-cache” pragma, while the board indexes at the SDMB do not. Perhaps that is the only issue.