General Forum

Re: Forum and Firefox - a tweak to save your sanity

tournedos — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 14:28:38 GMT

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.

Re: Forum and Firefox - a tweak to save your sanity

tournedos — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:27:55 GMT

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

Re: Forum and Firefox - a tweak to save your sanity

vikinger — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:02:41 GMT

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hit refresh when you get to the end of a thread (when you will frequently find that you were actually viewing a cached out of date page.)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

Re: Forum and Firefox - a tweak to save your sanity

vikinger — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:34:35 GMT

Worked for me!

Vikinguk

Re: Forum and Firefox - a tweak to save your sanity

Keith Saunders — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:32:53 GMT

I can confirm that your solution works very well..

Thank you very much for all your research...

Re: Forum and Firefox - a tweak to save your sanity

tournedos — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:02:00 GMT

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.

Re: Forum and Firefox - a tweak to save your sanity

Tom — Thu, 21 May 2009 13:46:37 GMT

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

Re: Forum and Firefox - a tweak to save your sanity

Stonk — Thu, 21 May 2009 12:35:03 GMT

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.

Re: Forum and Firefox - a tweak to save your sanity

Gerd — Thu, 21 May 2009 10:30:41 GMT

Works like a charm - Thanks!

Re: Forum and Firefox - a tweak to save your sanity

darren — Thu, 21 May 2009 09:12:15 GMT

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

All working as described, thanks.

Re: Forum and Firefox - a tweak to save your sanity

Quim43 — Thu, 21 May 2009 08:32:34 GMT

Done!

Thanks again.

Re: Forum and Firefox - a tweak to save your sanity

tournedos — Thu, 21 May 2009 08:28:14 GMT

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).

Re: Forum and Firefox - a tweak to save your sanity

Puncher — Thu, 21 May 2009 08:06:04 GMT

I have a counter-plugin!

Re: Forum and Firefox - a tweak to save your sanity

tournedos — Thu, 21 May 2009 08:05:41 GMT

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
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.

Re: Forum and Firefox - a tweak to save your sanity

tournedos — Thu, 21 May 2009 07:57:30 GMT

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