How to force a full page refresh (not from cache) in Firefox 4.0?
I'm on Firefox 8 and Ctrl + F5 definitely is the shortcut to a full page reload.
In FireBug, on a Net tab open a menu (small triangle in the tab) and select Disable Browser Cache.
Go to the url address: about:config. This should load the Firefox config settings in the window for editing. You may see a warning message stating, "This might void your warranty!" that will require you to click through to load the settings. Then find the browser.cache.check_doc_frequency key and change it to 1.
For reference, valid values for browser.cache.check_doc_frequency are:
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. ← This one
2 – Never check for a new version – always load the page from cache. (offline mode?)
3- Check for a new version when the page is out of date. (Default)
Obviously this will affect your entire browsing experience, but it's this or CTRL + F5 a few times.
I've found that it can take up to 3 settings to make this work when dealing with inter-dependent Javascript files. The following works in FireFox 39 (and probably earlier versions as well):
- Open Firefox Developer Tools
- Click in the gear tab (right hand side, 4th from the right)
- Find the Advance Settings section (3rd column), and click on "Disable Cache (when toolbox is open)"
- Open a new tab and type about:config into the URL
- Search for "browser.cache.check_doc_frequency", and change its value to 1
- Search for "network.http.use-cache" and change its value to "false" by clicking on the line. Keep in mind for complex pages, this could significantly increase your time for page refresh.
Special thanks to the following for getting me on the right track:
- https://stackoverflow.com/a/26326936/1274852
- https://superuser.com/a/411826/143027
- http://www.neiland.net/blog/article/turn-off-firefox-caching-when-doing-javascript-development/
Of course, if this is for more than just debugging and you want explicit control over the pages in production, you should do it in the page headers: http://www.mobify.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-http-cache-headers/
As far as I know, at least in 3.x series, 2nd or 3rd refresh in a row forces Firefox to retrieve full page content again. I can agree that it seems like it is not always working.