MacOS – `Unknown` file download after reload in Safari 8.0 on OS X Yosemite

Safari (for iPod and iPad) 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 few pages respective to amount of your device RAM.

You can try a third-party browser that has offline caching, and it'll remedy the situation. like:

1. Mercury
2. iCab
3. Atomic Web Browser

or if you Limit the number of tabs open in Safari to 2 or 3. It won't refresh.

Strictly speaking, no. For simple HTML forms using Common Gateway Interface (CGI), the web page you see is the output of a process which uses the form data as an input. Put another way, the server needs the form data to generate the page. There a lot of ways to get around that using back-end databases, cookies, javascript, etc. But generally speaking: no-form, no-result.

You mentioned clicking in the URL bar and pressing return, but if the form uses the GET method (form data in the URL itself), then clicking in the URL bar and pressing return does effectively resend it. However, if the form uses the POST method (form data sent in the HTTP request body), then clicking the URL bar and pressing will not send the form data and so the page will not be regenerated.

Note that if you tell Safari to reload a form-result page, it will usually ask you to confirm that you really want to do that, then resend the form data. The reason it asks is that there may well be some side-effect of the form (like charging your credit card) which you might not want to repeat. That's poor CGI design, but it happens.