Re: [tlug] Browser blues

[Josh Glover <tlug@example.com>]

Quoth Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon (Sun 2004-06-06 01:32:27PM +0900):

> Josh Glover wrote:
> 
> >Caching pages and manually saving them are two different things. *That*
> >is my point, and Steve's question.
>
> Had an interesting experience today.... using Firefox, I clicked on an 
> old "Under Construction" site and the new updated version didn't come 
> up... so I manually typed it n and still I was only getting the old 
> "Under Construction" site.  Other browsers (Mozilla, Netscape, IE) were 
> working, but not Firefox.  Finally I clicked on "Reload current page" 
> and the new version came up.  I had thought that the browser tried the 
> Internet first and then fell back on caching, but in this case it was 
> the other way around!  A bug?.......  Ah - and Firefox under Linux was 
> working - this happened on a MicroMuck box with Firefox....

Caching is a hard problem to solve, so I would not be surprised if
there remain bugs in even Mozilla's implementation (which has been
tested heavily for years by people like you and me). However, Mozilla's
caching is complicated, and you may have been seeing correct behaviour
WRT how Mozilla was configured.

(Before anyone gets confused, Firefox is really just a different UI
for Gecko, the Mozilla rendering engine. All the config stuff works
the same, but the menus are stripped down. This is why I keep referring
to "Mozilla this, Mozilla that" in a discussion about Firefox.)

Firefox unfortunately does not provide a GUI way to configure the
proxy settings like Mozilla does (Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced
-> Cache). However, it does honour Mozilla settings, and you will
notice that Mozilla gives you four options for cache comparisons:

"Compare the page in the cache to the page on the network:
 1. Every time I view the page
 2. When the page is out of date
 3. Once per session
 4. Never"

So, if Firefox was doing (3) or (4), that would explain the behaviour
that you witnessed. Maybe even if it was doing (2). One way to find
out:

: jmglov@example.com; grep -i cache /home/jmglov/.phoenix/default/c8eqjnsz.slt/prefs.js
user_pref("browser.cache.check_doc_frequency", 1);
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.parent_directory", "/home/jmglov/.mozilla/default/dwliqxyu.slt");
user_pref("intl.charsetmenu.browser.cache", "ISO-8859-1");

The first line is the operative one:

user_pref("browser.cache.check_doc_frequency", 1);

1 must mean "check every time", and actually corresponds to my (1)
above!

If your prefs.js does not have a "browser.cache.check_doc_frequency"
setting, try adding the line above, *backing up your prefs.js first!*

Cheers,
Josh

-- 
Josh Glover

Gentoo Developer (http://dev.gentoo.org/~jmglov/)
Tokyo Linux Users Group Listmaster (http://www.tlug.jp/)

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