All Products Community Forum

Hi all,

I’ve been using Firefox for a while now, but coming from Chrome, I’m finding some aspects of Firefox’s cache management and tab behavior a bit inconvenient, and I wanted to share my thoughts.

The issue:

When I restart Firefox (version 133.0.3-1), it loads webpages from the disk cache, which is fine because I’ve set browser.cache.disk.enable to true and browser.cache.check_doc_frequency to 2, it will always make a request to the server on restarting Firefox with the default value of 3. However, the problem arises when I open new tabs — they also load from the disk cache instead of requesting fresh content from the server.

What I’m looking for:

   A way to have Firefox:

Load webpages from the disk cache when restarting the browser (which I want, and I have set browser.cache.disk.enable to true for this). But always make fresh requests from the server when opening new tabs, no matter what the cache settings are.

In Chrome, this behavior is more intuitive — it loads from the cache after restart but always fetches from the server for new tabs, which I find to be much more reasonable.

I understand that about:config provides settings like browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand, but adjusting this option makes Firefox fetch content from the server for all tabs, including those opened after a restart. This doesn’t seem like a perfect solution because it takes away the ability to use the disk cache after restarting the browser.

I would really appreciate it if Firefox could offer more granular control over this behavior, so users could get the benefits of both caching and real-time requests based on the type of tab (restart vs. new tab).

Thanks for your attention, and I hope to see some improvements in future updates!

Steps to recreate:

1. Open any website
2. Make any css changes. These will be shown in the Changes tab in the dev tools
3. Close dev tools, then re-open. Now those changes won't be shown

Sometimes I need to close dev tools in order to see how the web page would look normally.

Hello,

I have been experiencing this issue for a while, but only just now noticed it. When I hover over a tab, nothing shows up; no preview, no title, no web address, nothing. I have a few extensions, but uninstalled any that would effect tabs at all, with no change. All other extensions I have had since I switched over to Firefox. I have attempted to search for solutions, and have followed what I found. Multiple support questions here have gotten the answer of going into the config to change the following Boolean variables to be true:

   browser.tabs.hoverPreview.enabled 
   browser.tabs.hoverPreview.showThumbnails 

but when I went to do so, they were both already set to true. I disabled and then re-enabled them just to check, but nothing changed. I have a ridiculous amount of tabs open, but that's the only other thing I can think of that would be causing this issue. Just in case, I am in the process of closing as many as I can.

Any advice or assistance would be appreciated.

Thank you.

Why is there in about:config no reference to documentation of the displayed settings?

e.g. browser.chrome.toolbar_tips.hide_on_keydown

What is it? What is the meaning of the values? What is the default value? Why do we have to guess?

It is probably documented somewhere (I hope). Why is there no reference to it in about:config?

Hi Firefoxians,

I need to ask regardining this security.cert_pinning.enforcement_level. how can i set this value using the windwos server GPO? i could not find this even after copying the firefox.admx file. could someone please guide me how can i acheive it?

I would really appreciate the help!

Regards Sheras

Hello,

I have an issue where, when I switch tabs with Ctrl+Tab, my mouse cursor accidentally triggers something if it happens to be in the center. This is very annoying. I tried Googling how to turn off tab visualization through the config, but it hasn't worked so far.

   * browser.ctrlTab.previews

• browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab
• browser.tabs.animate
• toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled

So now, the only option I see is to turn off Recent Tabs, but then the browser becomes unusable. I also tried the same on a new clean user profile and even on new Mozilla-based browsers, but still nothing. It would be ideal to make the cursor inactive while switching tabs, like it is in Arc Browser and probably many others. But I would be happy enough to just turn off tab switching visualization.