Opera is pretty aggressive and intelligent with caching, which gives it a reputation of a memory hog on benchmarks, but it apparently scales back in resource-constrained environments. To my understanding, Opera caches not just the page code, but the parsed & loaded DOM tree of recent content. This makes for fast go-back times, as well as (sometimes) saving the page state on dynamic pages.
That "ought to be" part of the browser, not the renderer, since it's hanging on to content that the renderer is already done with. But I'm not familiar enough with either architecture to answer for certain.
Re:WebKit: An Objective View
by politician on Thursday February 14, 2013 @12:27PM
(#5220535)
This. I've got a mobile device with 32GB of unused space, but Android wants to reload from the network? My laptop has 1TB, but Chrome wants to reload from the network when "restoring all tabs"? Look Chrome, I'll tell you when it's safe to refresh, mkay?
There is still one thing I miss from Opera to this day.
Pretty much instant go-back/go-forward times. Go to any static page, then another, then back and forward is nearly instant in Opera.
In Chrome, pages get reloaded and can sometimes take from 1 to 5+ seconds if some server lagged out. Which is ridiculous if you just want to go back to where you _just_ were a millisecond ago, because something caught your attention after u had already clicked on some link. Why don't they keep these things cached?
So my question is: is that a browser-level feature or rendering engine-level one? Will Opera preserve it? Will it finally come to other browsers?
Note: Safari has recently added the two-finger swipe that reveals the previous/next pages. However, they're using cached images while the actual page gets loaded. Better than nothing, but I still prefer Opera's true blazing speed here.