Why is it that when my wifi is interrupted and then comes back on, the webpage I’m on just stalls until being refreshed instead of coming back online?
In: Technology
When you are connected to a webpage, your computer phoned up another computer somewhere to get that webpage. That other computer is sitting around listening for other computers to call it, and it “serves” up the webpage in a response. That’s why we call them “servers”.
Say you fire off a request for a webpage to a server and then your Internet connection cuts out for a minute right after. Your request flies out, gets to the server, the server happily responds, and then the message bounces off of your router because you’re not connected when the reply arrives. At that point the data is simply thrown away.
The connection is re-established shortly and now we have a problem. The server thinks its job is done, because it sent the message just like it’s supposed to, but your computer is still thinking it’s supposed to be waiting for the reply, so it continues to wait for a reply that will never come.
Your browser will probably give up waiting after some amount of time of waiting, a pre-programmed “give up” threshold. Half a minute or so, maybe. That is its way to prevent itself from waiting forever. It probably won’t re-send the request automatically, though, because there are many, many situations where you don’t want to send a reply twice in a row automatically. What if you were buying something and you just clicked the “Buy Now” button? The server got your request, it’s been bought, but your computer didn’t see that the sale went through. if your browser automatically refreshed it for you, you might end up buying it again. That’s not good. So they usually don’t bother. They leave it up to you to decide if you want to try refreshing the page because they want you to stay in control of that kind of thing.
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