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Firefox loads page from cache without checking online to see if page has been updated.

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A frequently updated page is checked daily, but does not seem to have new info. Checked website page with IE and new info appears. Cleared Firefox cache and updated page appears. Seems to lrad to conclusion that Firefox is blindly loading cached page without checking to see whether online page has been updated. Is there an option to NEVER load pages from cache?

A frequently updated page is checked daily, but does not seem to have new info. Checked website page with IE and new info appears. Cleared Firefox cache and updated page appears. Seems to lrad to conclusion that Firefox is blindly loading cached page without checking to see whether online page has been updated. Is there an option to NEVER load pages from cache?

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Just to clarify, this problem is on your Windows system?

To reload bypassing the cache, you can use Ctrl+Shift+r (instead of just Ctrl+r) or Shift+clicking the reload button in the address bar.

To answer your question more directly, Firefox economizes on traffic by only checking whether a page has changed after it has expired (the server indicates the expiration when the page is sent). And yes, there is a setting for that.

You can experiment with different values here:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste cache and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.cache.check_doc_frequency preference and enter your preferred value (this is copied from a mozillaZine article):

  • 0 => Check for a new version of a page once per session (a session starts when the first application window opens and ends when the last application window closes).
  • 1 => Check for a new version every time a page is loaded.
  • 2 => Never check for a new version - always load the page from cache.
  • 3 => Check for a new version when the page is out of date. (Default)

If you choose 1, does that solve the problem?

Source: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.check_doc_frequency