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This may seem really trivial, but somehow it really annoys me.

I'm somewhat OCD, so I can't bear to have any unread notifications. Sometimes, when I'm reading a post, and I see a notification, I'll click it, see what it is, then quickly return. However, the notification icon is still there, and I have to refresh to get rid of it.

Also, if I write a comment, then click a link on the page, then click the back button, I have to refresh to see the comment I made.

Yup. I know, first world problem... but it really bothers me. Besides, it's all in the details.

Is this due to the way that the browser caches pages, or a bug in stackexchange?

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  • Yep, irritating.
    – Lance Roberts
    Jan 5, 2014 at 19:22
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    It depends. The back button takes you to the page as it appeared originally, without anything JavaScript might have added. So if the page loaded with notifications, then leaving and hitting back will load that page with the indicator.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Jan 5, 2014 at 20:36
  • @animuson So there's not anything a site can do to solve this?
    – hkk
    Jan 5, 2014 at 20:40
  • Personally I like it (in general) when the back button acts as close as possible to a true back, as opposed to reloading a new version
    – Richard Tingle
    Jan 5, 2014 at 20:44
  • @RichardTingle I guess that this "bug" isn't really a bug, depending on how people use the browser.
    – hkk
    Jan 5, 2014 at 20:47
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    Same behavior that was over four years ago still persists, and it's by design.
    – Shadow Wizard Says No More War
    Jan 5, 2014 at 21:11
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    @ShadowWizard But that was when the notifications were statically loaded for each page request. Now they are updated live the behaviour should be better.
    – Martin Smith
    Jan 5, 2014 at 21:21
  • @ShadowWizard If it's by design, then it's a bad design, IMO. The point of notifications is to notify users of new information relating to them that they should look at. If the link I click isn't from the notifications, then the indicator should stay the same, but if I click a notification and return to the page, the indicator should be gone, since its not new info any more.
    – hkk
    Jan 5, 2014 at 21:31
  • @cloudcoder2000 There's no way for the page to know that you came back to the page. The browser literally loads the page back up as it was originally when you requested it the first time, like you had just received the page from the server again.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Jan 5, 2014 at 21:57
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    @animuson - It could keep track of the timestamp of the last item seen clientside (e.g. in a cookie or HTML5 storage) and not show the notifications for stuff before that.
    – Martin Smith
    Jan 5, 2014 at 22:12
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    I disagree that this is a duplicate, the other question was about the old orange notifications bar. Accepted answer mentions AJAX. Now we have AJAX, the orange bar is mostly retired, and the code base is entirely different. This is a new issue.
    – Martin Smith
    Jan 7, 2014 at 11:57
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    OK, still think it's by design but guess there were indeed many changes so new report is fine.
    – Shadow Wizard Says No More War
    Jan 7, 2014 at 22:21

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