TWIL January 16th 2026

• It's incredible how far you can get in an unfamiliar codebase in an unfamiliar language with find/replace and "go to definition"
  • I'm now officially an iOS/Android engineer :p

I already knew browsers cached a certain number of pages in the history stack; that's why navigating back and forward is always near instant. What I learned this week was:

• It's called bfcache
• It caches a snapshot of the page, including the JS heap(!)
• It's hard to opt out of; you can set headers, manually reload in an event listener or have an unload event listener
• At least so far, it seems manually reloading in an pageshow can work in dev but not work in prod -__-

Links

• Date is out and Temporal is in - Mat Marquis

Since I recently replaced some of the time-related packages mentioned in this article with native Date implementations, I appreciate the problems Temporal will solve in about 5 years when it has enough adoption to use.