why is Firefox loading out-of-date reddit pages

January 28, 2023 10:50 AM

i just noticed last night that when i am reading and bopping around on reddit, Firefox 109.0 is not loading up-to-date pages, but is showing me pages from hours ago until I manually F5 refresh. Win10, Ff 109.0, no user-initiated configuration changes.

i open a new blank tab in FF and from my saved speeddial shortcuts i click on an high-volume subreddit and it shows me the same page with the same posts and comment counts i have already seen, as if it is pulling from a locally-chached previous version of the page. i have to manually refresh the page to get new comments.

for example, i open a new tab, click my shortcut, it loads a subreddit and it has a post with 60 comment, unchanged from the last time i visited, then i click refresh and the comments jump to 90.

i have never had this problem until i noticed it sometime last night. i looked at the Ff release notes and did not see anything regarding a behavior change. i have been browsing exactly like this for years and i have never seen this sort of behavior. i read several time-sensitive subreddits where one would refresh a lot to keep up and i think i would have noticed this behavior long long ago if it had always been like this.

has anyone else noticed this? how can i fix it?

posted by glonous keming to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Possibly related: two days ago Chrome on my phone started loading both metafilter and reddit in "preview" (may be a coincidence that it's metafilter and reddit, these are just the websites most likely to be already open) when I open my browser before refreshing after a second or two to load the live page. This has happened from time to time in the past and then seems to resolve itself after several days.
posted by phunniemee at 12:35 PM on January 28, 2023

If you didn't do anything locally, it's possible your ISP has started to cache content to improve response time.
posted by kschang at 1:08 PM on January 28, 2023

Caching content isn't really something that a man-in-the-middle like an ISP can do to a site accessed via HTTPS, though. The browser can do it because the browser is an endpoint for the encrypted HTTPS traffic. An ISP can see the IP address of the server the browser connects to, and might also be able to glean the DNS name of that server, but has no access to the URLs or content of any web pages fetched from there.

If this new behaviour didn't show up immediately after a browser update, I'd be more inclined to suspect temporary server-side misconfiguration. If it resolves spontaneously over the next few days, that would confirm it.
posted by flabdablet at 1:16 PM on January 28, 2023

It might be displaying the version in your local cache while finishing the download of what's changed since your last visit.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:16 PM on January 28, 2023

One thing that often works for me when a script-heavy site mysteriously stops working right is trying a hard refresh (Shift-F5 in Firefox). Sometimes it seems that a site update will break an internal API in a way that stops cached versions of a script library it's collected from elsewhere from working right, and a hard refresh forces it to start over with the latest versions of everything it needs.

I've also seen sites make breaking changes to the way they handle existing session cookies, and clearing cookies before logging in again usually fixes that.
posted by flabdablet at 1:54 AM on January 29, 2023