Topic on Talk:VisualEditor

Unable to stop the editor from loading while offline

4
Summary last edited by Kaartic 04:06, 2 January 2018 6 years ago
Kaartic (talkcontribs)

Once when I loaded a page while I'm online an went offline to read the page, I accidentally hit the 'Edit' button. This started the progress bar for the editor and obviously it got stuck after sometime as it was unable to connect to the network. It was frustrating for me as I couldn't cancel the page load and thus couldn't read the article that I loaded until I got the error dialog.

It would be nice if there was a way to stop the editor from loading while it's being loaded. This would help the readers to proceed with what they were reading quickly when they accidentally hit the 'Edit' button instead of waiting for the editor to load and then cancel the edit operation.

Note: This a copy of a similar topic at the Visual Wikitext editor.

Elitre (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Isn't "Back" (or its equivalent on mobile) that button? Doesn't the requested article stay in cache, so you don't need to reconnect to read it?

Kaartic (talkcontribs)

I'm not sure what you mean by a "Back" button but I don't see any while the visual editor is loading. Here's a screen shot,

Screen shot of visual editor; loading

In case you are referring to the browser's back button, it had no effect on the loading of the visual editor (possibly due to the caching!). IOW, hitting the "Back" button on the browser and hitting "Forward" button didn't cancel the loading of the visual editor.

197.218.90.108 (talkcontribs)

If you're online pressing ESC (or the equivalent in your operating system /platform) will cancel the loading. If you're offline, allowing it to pseudo-load, then pressing retry and then ESC multiple times seems to also cancel the loading.

Also this isn't specific to visualeditor. All other editors behave in a similar fashion, in fact they show the offline message even faster. One problem is that VisualEditor re-uses the same page, so after it loads if one tries to go back, they hit the same "page" or editor again.

Detecting offline mode is a very tricky thing. There might be temporary network lapses or someone might be using a local proxy that contains a cache of the page, or one of a million other possibilities when it comes to networks.

Chrome had (or has?) to have a more aggressive caching configuration option that could be activated and would store such older pages. Generally speaking though, if one wants to see stuff offline, then saving the page is the best option, even if offline it can retrieve it from the cache and create a copy.