Citation:
Refresh should be Refresh
What's worse though is that in FireFox 3's default configuration even clicking the Refresh button will not force 304s. Apparently the Refresh button behavior has been changed to only re-run the last request EXACTLY in the same mode it was run. So if you did a Shift-Refresh on the last hit, it will repeat that behavior. If you did a plain link click that will replay exactly and so on. There's no longer an explicit reloading of resources which is now delegated to Shift-Refresh and which no 'typical' user will think of.
The FireFox Refresh button's Refresh behavior is pretty lame. Having an easy way to force pages and all related content to reload is key in a browser environment where the underlying resources may frequently change on the server. Between the refresh and last-modified issues described FireFox 3.x is becoming a bit shaky for the stability, especially for applications that are rich in client side styling and script behavior. It's not uncommon for my apps to update CSS or script content several times a day and there's now a good possibility that these changes may not match changes in the underlying application that serves non-static content. This has bit me quite frequently now during development when refreshing pages and expecting to see update content only to find that things like Script files have not refreshed and a few times in production with customers complaining.
One temporary solution might be (thanks to Steve Black for the hint) to force the CSS references in pages to refresh by changing the URL slightly. Like
<link href="wwThreads.css?i=1" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
The additional querystring will force even FireFox to refresh the data. But that's one heck of a hack. But I may have to resort to this because nothing else works reliably at this point.
So... has anybody else run into this in their applications? In searching around the Web it doesn't appear that there's much talk about this issue - I didn't find anything related to last-modified and a few discussions - which are related - to caching and back button and refresh behavior. It looks like Firefox is trying to be too agressive in caching. Sure, caching is cool for performance, but not if it's at the cost of stale content.
