As a web developer, I am constantly reloading pages that are still in the development stage to see how my code is affecting the outcome (Dreamweaver can only preview so well in the design window, thank goodness for F12). Since I want to be absolutely sure that what I’m seeing is the most current version, I always turn my “Temporary Internet Files” and my “Cache” off. This becomes especially important as I develop with Flash.
When Firefox came out, I went to the options dialogue to turn off the cache and only noticed the option to specify how big the cache could be. So I ignorantly set the size to zero and thought it would do the trick. wrong! This causes major problems with our friend the Firefox.
The first issue I noticed was that I could no longer install extensions and themes. For some reason, firefox has to cache them before it can install them. So, thinking I was a genius, I set the cache limit to 1, instead of zero. That fixed the problem. For the past 6 months (or however long I’ve been using Firefox now) that’s the way it’s been. Until today.
Lately I’ve noticed that my personal websites (including the blog you are reading now) have had problems loading the CSS file. It was kind of random; sometimes it loaded, sometimes it didn’t. I searched and researched the problem blaming Firefox all the way. But today, as part of my research, I upped my cache to 10000 and the problem went away. So I started researching more in that direction and came across a help file on mozilla.org telling me that if I wanted to turn off cache I could do it by plugging about:config into the address bar and changing the setting browser.cache.disk.enable to false.
DUH! Why didn’t I think of that before. Probably because it should be in the options menu to begin with, in my opinion.
Now even though I have my cache set to zero my CSS files are loading properly and extensions have no problems installing because I have actually turned cache “off”.