An odd problem with IE bookmark files

Question

In addition to storing the URL, IE bookmarks store the names and locations of any loaded iframe or frame on the page you bookmark. When you load that bookmark, IE tries to load the frames on the page with the urls in the bookmark file.

Maybe this was a good idea in the 90's, (or maybe it's still a good idea today and I just can't think of the reason), but for any sufficiently complicated web app that uses iframes it can easily cause problems. This is the very situation I find myself in now.

While I'm working on handling this in my app, what I'd really like is a way to just turn this behavior off. Short of that, if someone could tell me why bookmarks store and use this information I would be one happy camper as I am intensely curious.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

I suspect you mailed this question to the IEBlog a few days ago. :-)

IE doesn't offer an option to suppress this, and the reason it exists is basically still valid today: Users expect that loading a bookmark will reconstitute the page as they originally saw it. While it's true that some web applications based on frames cannot be reconstituted in this way, it remains entirely true that sites that allow navigations of subframes usually can only be reconstituted correctly if the subframes are navigated to the same URL they were when the bookmark was saved.