Maybe it’s something in UI, but many times I watch pictures (not even videos, they are their own can of worms), and want to save them, it shows me that I’m downloading them again although they are cached in whatever app I see them from.
Like this link with a happy dog: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/71/1e/52/711e52f1d6c7ead78f4380214f68c259.jpg
I see it in high rez in my browser, I can zoom in, and I can’t tell any difference from a copy that I can download, but it’s still, well, another download if I want to save it, and not a move from cache to my download folder, another request to the server, another waste of traffic.
Is there some rule of sandboxing for everything you load that I don’t know about? In cases like our fediverse, I wouldn’t like to cause double load when I already have the picture I want. Can I cut it down with some plugin in mobile Firefox?
I feel like I’m missing something big time.
It’s simpler code to re-download the file than retrieve what cached version may or may not exist in memory or on disk. Developers often like to keep code simple at the expense of some kinds of efficiency, like this.
An image is usually small enough to be downloaded in no time on a fast connection, which is what developers usually have and don’t stop to think that others might not have.
A video is probably being streamed so earlier segments may no longer be present locally.
If it were difficult or time consuming to lookup or fetch items from the cache, it’s not a very effective cache 😬
