Wladimir Palant@WPalant@infosec.exchange
I’m surprised that Firefox still has this “feature” which has been annoying people for the past 25 years or so. If you have a page open that just won’t finish loading and you finally give up and navigate away, chances are that the page will briefly show up before immediately being replaced by the site you navigated to. The typical reaction is: “oh no, it finally finished loading at the very moment I gave up! 😱
”
What actually happened is: navigating away aborts the current loading sequence. And if there was enough data loaded to do some rendering but the browser was holding it off because it was waiting for some files still being loaded – that rendering will happen now, nothing stopping it any more. Obviously, it doesn’t actually need to render now, it won’t do anything useful other than mislead the user. But it seems that nobody thought of adding this special case to disable rendering if loading was aborted due to navigating away.
Interestingly though, there is a special case disabling rendering when loading was aborted due to the user clicking the Stop button. This one hasn’t always been there, pressing Stop used to make already loaded parts of the page show up.