Can Firefox's "view source" be set to not make a new GET request?
This is sort of tangential to coding, but programmers often do "view source" on their own pages and on others' pages. I learned that when you do the normal View Source in Firefox, it takes the URL you're at and issues another GET request to that URL. There are two reasons why this is bad:
- If you've just issued a POST and do View Source, you won't see the HTML that your browser is actually rendering for you.
- If the site author has incorrectly made a form that takes some action (sends email or writes to a DB or whatever), then that action will be taken (or attempted, anyway) again. That's sort of dangerous.
I'd heard there was something I could add to about:config that would prevent this, but had no luck. I also read about some extensions that would get around this, Firebug chief among them, but ctrl-shift-u is so convenient when compared to F12 and then a couple of clicks to find the element you're interested in.
So... Is there a switch I can flip to make Firefox's View Source act like View Generated Source all the time and hit the cache instead of making a new GET request?
Solution 1:
If you install the web developer toolbar extension, there's an option under "View Source" called "View Generated Source" which will show you the current source of the page, including any DOM changes you may have made.
Solution 2:
You do a Ctrl+A, right click and "view selection source", that doesn't re-request the page.
Solution 3:
"View Generated Source" is not the same source code you get with "View Source".
View Generated Source "improves" the code, parsing the html, adding newlines among tags, changing attributes order (width="100%" cellpadding="0" => cellpadding="0" width="100%"), adding attributes values (nowrap => nowrap="nowrap") and tags (tbody from nowhere), etc.
You might think this is better, but if you want to compare the old generated source with the actual file, it's useless.
Your best bet is search the directory cache.
Regards
Solution 4:
Use the FireBug extension. It displays (and allows you to navigate) only the rendered source, so there is no need for another request (and it shows Javascript changes).
Solution 5:
Despite being broken for at least sixteen solid years, and continuing to be officially unresolved on Mozilla's bug tracker, this actually seems to have been silently fixed with the release of Firefox 92.0, released on September 17, 2021.
Previous answer:
This is broken in Firefox for some time now:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=307089
They aren't very responsive on their bug tracker, but your options are:
(1) complain at the bug tracker,
(2) fix it yourself it's open source software,
(3) find another browser.