A while ago I switched from using IE to FF and Opera for day to day
browsing, and I'm mostly more than happy with both. However, I've
found two odd behaviours (well, odd compared to how IE seems to do
things at least), which make no sense to me.

Situation 1: I've found an interesting website hosted somewhere far
off with very limited bandwidth to the UK. It's slow but functional.
I follow a link and leave it for an hour or so while a page loads with
several large images included (pictures of locomotives say), which I
wish to save to my hard disk.

Once the page has loaded I right click and select "Save as". What I'd
expect the browser to do at this point is simply copy the image it has
already downloaded to the location I specify. This would be fast,
simple, and avoid the risk of "losing" the image if the remote server,
or a link between it and me, fails between the page loading and my
request to save the pic.

Instead however FireFox insists on attempting to download a fresh copy
of the image it already has in order to save it! This is at best
annoying, as it slows things down unnecessarily even on reasonably
quick connections, but in the greater scheme of things looks like
lunatic stupidity. It pointlessly increases traffic and greatly
increases the risk of not being able to save things you've seen on the
web.

Is there any reason for this weird and user-unfriendly behaviour?

Situation 2: I'm working on script-generated pages. The page in
question is generated on the fly from a large financial database and
takes many minutes to fully generate. So I can see what it's doing and
how far it's got I've arranged for it to print dots into a commented
out line as it runs. To find out how far it's got I select "View
Source". What I want the browser to do is show me the source it's
received so far. What it actually does is go off to the server and
re-request the page.

Surely this is madness? What if someone is looking at a dynamically
generated page that changes every time it's loaded - they see something
interesting and want to know how it's been done in the HTML - but view
source fetches an entirely different page.

Again, is there a reason for this, to me strange, behaviour?

"Pyromancer" <dj.pyromancer@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1142508196.192604.7690@p10g2000cwp.googlegrou ps.com...
It makes no sense to me, either. The "view source" should show you the
source of the page you're looking at, not the source of its own request to
the same URL.

d <d@example.com> wrote:
Impatience

What happens when you select 'view source' *after* the page has
fully downloaded? It should be shown immediately without another
server request being generated.

By requesting to view the source before the download has been
completed, you are effectively interrupting the current download.

Axel

<axel@white-eagle.invalid.uk> wrote in message
news:nbjSf.37045$wl.21434@text.news.blueyonder.co. uk...
Why? Shouldn't it just show you the source of what it has already? If it
can render it, it must be able to show you the source. Getting all confused
that someone clicked a menu option is no excuse for a modern browser to
start getting content left-and-right :-P

dave