Apple - Can you prevent the iPhone browser from reloading pages?

The behavior that you've described appears to be a limitation of the Safari mobile browser. Other users have complained about the Safari Mobile auto refresh behavior on several Apple community forum posts.

This iFans post offers some explanations and potential solutions:

This is not a feature... It's a limitation.

MobileSafari keeps website cache only in RAM, and therefore, once it runs out of RAM, it'll automatically destroy an entire page, forcing the refresh, disguising itself as an auto-refresh feature. You can only keep at most 3 pages open at any time... Even the iPhone 4 with double the amount of RAM can only keep 5 pages.

You can try a third-party browser that has offline caching, and it'll remedy the situation. Or alternatively, use the swap file mod I posted in the jailbreak forums and it should work, too.

These third-party browsers have offline page caching as far as I know:

• iCab Mobile (also supports concurrent tab, which means you can browse websites while listening to music on youtube, this is my personal favourite)
• Atomic Web Browser (many useful features, but the interface is a bit strange)
• Mercury (cool browser that looks like a shrunk version of desktop Safari)

Your choices appear to be:

• Use a jailbreak mod to increase the swap file size (hopefully will increase number of pages that can be stored)
• Use a third party browser that supports offline caching

Mobile Safari clears tabs from memory when it receives a low memory warning from the OS. For performance reasons, iOS doesn't do any paging to disk, so when something is moved out of memory, it's gone unless it's been saved. So the reason you have to reload pages is that other tasks on your iPhone (other apps or new browser tabs) are using memory, so Safari kicks the older tabs out of memory, and when you flip back to them, they need to be re-dowloaded.

This is system behaviour, and it can't be changed. However there are several apps that are designed to save pages for offline reading. I personally recommend Instapaper - very well designed, actively maintained by a great independent developer, and the service integrates with a lot of other apps, so you can save links from most RSS and Twitter clients, amongst other things.

The basic premise is that when you open a page you want to read later, you use a bookmarklet to save the page to Instapaper. Then open the app and it downloads a nicely formatted, text- and pictures-only version of your saved pages for reading at your convenience. It has lots of other features, including saving your position in an article and syncing it to any other Instapaper clients you use. Highly recommended.

I will give you a real fix of how to stop iPhone from reloading web pages. I have tried everything but there is no real fix in Safari. However, you can install browsers like Mercury etc. The Problem with such browsers is that they are not as good as Safari or Opera Mini. But I have lately come to know one feature in Opera Mini where one can stop web pages from reloading and it saves you huge data. I would strongly recommend you to give it a try.

Step 1. Install Opera Mini browser from the App Store (It works just like the Safari browser works)

Step 2. Open the browser and you will find 'O' sign in the middle - click 'O' sign.

Step 3. At top you will find 'Savings Enabled' click it. You will find three modes of Opera Mini there:

1. Opera mini
2. Opera turbo
3. Off

Step 4. Switch to Opera mini.

I would also recommend to keep text wrap mode on in 'advanced settings,' 'layout' tab.

To improve speed, switch off your phone for 2-5 minutes.