Blogs

If you are web-developer you probably already heard about regression bug in recent Firefoxes, event latest Firefox 3.0.5 is affected.

Bug is described here on Bugzilla [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=441751], it is fixed, and should be available in new version of Firefox.

As the bug description notes Firefox ignores cache control attributes so we can’t just use them:
Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate
Expires: Sun, 1 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT
Pragma: no-cache

Rare case is you need to tune cache then you can use browser.cache.check_doc_frequency parameter [http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.check_doc_frequency] that can be accessed with about:config URL.

But for others question is what to do right now, event with new version of Firefox we can’t ask users to update their Firefoxes.

There are 2 solutions that we have found and tested:

1. If you want to make Firefox to reload some page
You can generate new URLs for any cache sensitive resources every time.
Add some insignificant parameters to URLs: http://www.google.com/something?aaa

2. If you need to make some actions within some page,
for example you need to provide an unique attribute for images in Ads campaign.
You can use Javascript to generate it.
Firefox uses same page but execute Javascript everytime.

You can use following code to generate random number:

I hope men will update their browsers fast so we will not stick with that like with IE6.