You know the deal. You compose a letter in a browser. Your hand slips. You accidentally hit the backspace key or move to a new page. An error occurs, or your browser crashes. Your brilliant letter is lost forever.

IE and Chrome have built-in support to prevent this scenario, but you can still lose your content, depending on what site you visit. Take Basecamp and Facebook. I did a quick test and found that Basecamp worked with IE and Chrome, but Facebook worked only with Chrome.

Judging from the above, one might jump to the conclusion that IE is inferior. Or perhaps the Facebook application was simply not tested thoroughly in IE. Or maybe the page load event fires off some javascript that creates textboxes and adds them to the DOM on the fly, overwriting any pre-existing textboxes residing in the DOM. Who knows.

The bottom line? We're not doing a great job testing apps—especially email and web form web-apps—across browsers. This leads to a poor user experience, diminished productivity, and general frustration.

Developers: I'd like to call on you to fix this all-too-common problem. Here's a quick way to test your app:

• Visit any website
• Browse to a page with a textbox or web form.
• Type something there.
• Click the back arrow on the browser chrome or press the backspace key.
• Navigate back to the page with the textbox by clicking the forward arrow on the browser chrome.
• Does the text that you originally typed remain? It should. If it doesn't, there is work to do.
  

Testing across browsers might be tedious, but it's well worth the effort.

Do you have a "lost web form content" horror story? Have you learned to accept this situation as "the way of the web"? Let us know by leaving a comment. And if you tweet, follow us on Twitter to learn about new content, opinions and articles.