One of the greatest benefits of switching browsers (first to Mozilla, then Opera, then Firefox) was the feature that you could navigate (for instance back one to look at the context of something you were replying to, and when you went back the TEXTAREA retained the previous contents -- As long as you didn't leave the branch, e.g. going back and then following a different link, it was all good). Internet Explorer, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't feature this functionality.

Earlier today I happened to be authoring an verbose comment in Internet Explorer, on a site that only works with IE, and I accidentally back arrowed. Going forward, sure enough all of the other form fields were full, but the TEXTAREA was completely empty. All of my work was wiped out.

At moments like that I really, really hate Microsoft.

I should mention that it is the beta for IE 7, so this still is a ridiculously monstrous gap in the product.

Maybe this is meant as a security feature.

I feel your pain.

I entered a large amount of text into a SharePoint form and then tried to submit it. It came back with an error that my authentication had expired and "please use page refresh to renew it". So I refreshed the page, and you gessed, all my text had been wiped and I was left with a blank entry form. Yay!

Lesson learned: before submitting any web form, do Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C just in case...