Warning: please follow the instructions closely if you want to use this tweak. It has been tested on Firefox 3 on Windows, Mac and Linux, so it should be safe to use - but misconfiguration may create problems elsewhere! You will also need to use your "reload" button on the forum much more often than before to see the latest changes. However, in general, you should be happier with this tweak.

As especially the Wednesday© thredders are painfully aware of, using Firefox has been partly quite annoying since the forum upgrade. After each reload or visiting a link, you lose the context on the page where you were and you are returned to the top of the page.

I investigated the problem, and the cause of it is some HTTP headers that either the web server or Community Server is sending with each page. These are such as

• Expires: -1 (meaning the page has expired sometime with the dinosaurs)
• Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store (instructing the browser and proxies to never store the page)
  
• Pragma: no-cache (ditto)
  

Without getting into details, these are supposedly there because the pages are dynamic in nature, and on each visit, they should be always reloaded instead of getting them from the browser cache. All fine in principle, but this also causes Firefox to lose context -> you will be maniacly trying to figure out where you were and what is actually new.

For the most part, this is just unnecessary. And getting around this is what I'm getting at in this "workshop".

Fortunately, Firefox has been made extensible with plugins and add-ons, which can be used to add new features or alter its behaviour. As a further strike of luck, we're not alone with this problem, and there already exists an add-on that can be used for our current aim. This is called BetterCache, and is available here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/6371

You can install it from the link as you would any Firefox add-on. Next we need to configure it (sorry - my screenshots are from a Finnish Firefox, but all your buttons should be in the same places, although with different text )

Select Tools | Add-ons from the Firefox menu, and you should get a window similar to this (click on "Extensions" on the upper row to get a list of add-ons, then select the BetterCache entry):

Now, click on the Settings button on the BetterCache bar. You will get a window similar to the one below. These settings are good at the defaults, so leave them like this:

It works!!

Thank You very much. You are right it was a pain in the *ss.

Now select the Always-cache list tab. On a fresh install of BetterCache, there's already one entry on the list with a mime-type of '*'. Select it and click "Remove". Otherwise you will run into problems on other web sites!

Then, fill in the fields like below. This data means that we want Firefox to cache every single object, be it a page, image, or whatever, under the server space http://forum.beoworld.org/ :

Now, remember to click on "Add" to actually add this rule into the list below, and then close the settings window with "Ok" [sic].

You can also close the add-on list window now. At this point, we have now modified the behaviour of Firefox so that it will cache everything from forum.beoworld.org, no matter what the server is trying to instruct. This means that:

• you can move back and forth between pages of topics without them reloading all the time
• you can follow a link, use the back button, and still end up where you started
• you can reload a topic without always ending up at the top of the page or your last post (hello, Wed©thredders)
• on a slow connection, you will probably experience much faster Beoworlding
• as a side effect, the load on the forum web server is greatly reduced

However, there are some downsides. While writing this, I noted the following "problems":

• after editing your post or replying to somebody, you may need to click reload before you see your changes
• not seen so far, but it is possible that BetterCache has bugs and alters something elsewhere than on Beoworld

I'd be glad if others tested this as well, and reported if they see any problems. If needed, I think it should be possible to configure BetterCache so that it will only force cacheing on topics and topic lists, and leave editing posts alone.

The bad news is that I will now post at random page positions on a Wednesday©

I have a counter-plugin!

This topic should now be ready as far as the instructions go - Quim, please review all steps, you may have now a setup that caches too much and you will run into problems later... (remove the '*' entry from the list).

Done!

Thanks again.

Just followed your excellent install notes and installed the add-on to firefox on my mac.

All working as described, thanks.

Works like a charm - Thanks!

Weyhey it works! One happy bunny here. Well done Mika.   Now that's one computer problem solved & I only have to worry about the problem between my keyboard and chair!!!

Mods perhaps this should be a sticky??? Was really a bugbear for many.

It works! Thanks a lot for your work, Mika!

And right now I'm on FF 3.0.3 on Linux, so this seems to be truly cross-platform as well

Looks like it's safe to use - one thing I noted is that when you go from page to page on topic listings (or inside a topic), you will have to click on reload on each page to see possible changes. This is expected behaviour when you think about it, but it got me at first as well...

Another good thing seems to be that this fixes the smilies rendering problem for me at least - I no longer need to add a space after them when they are at the end of a line. Previously they would never appear otherwise, or only after several jumps between compose - preview.

EDIT: I have updated the steps above to make them clearer - no change in the actual procedure.

I can confirm that your solution works very well..

Thank you very much for all your research...

Worked for me!

Vikinguk

But........... as warned in the first entry of this thread, you do need to keep using your refresh or reload button. Clicking links in the forum can just bring up the last cached version of the page and will fail to show subsequent posts until you refresh the forum page or just routinely hit refresh when you get to the end of a thread (when you will frequently find that you were actually viewing a cached out of date page.)

Vikinguk

You're right - sometimes really old versions can come up from the cache, especially if you have been following "latest post" links before, and never the "clean" url without the #2739472 or whatever anchor in the end.

Another thing that seems problematic is editing your old posts multiple times - sometimes you get a really old version from the cache and it can be confusing. I have found it safest to click on reload before "edit". As I said earlier, I may try to develop this further so that editing posts are excluded from the "forced cache".

But all in all, now that I'm behind a mostly very slow GPRS link, using the forum is much more enjoyable. The real test will be on Wednesday©, though

I recently upgraded to Firefox 3.5.x and noticed that it behaved better in some other web pages that used to have a similar problem. As a test, I disabled BetterCache and it seems that Beoworld is cured as well! Finally the same behaviour as pre-forum upgrade

I'm not sure if I like FF 3.5 generally - they have once again moved things around just for the sake of moving things around - but if you decide to upgrade, you might want to revert this tweak as well. It's still beneficial on a very slow connection, as it avoids reloading the pages every time you click on "back" and so on.