Stupid Firefox question

August 26, 2004 12:18 AM

Firefox filter...

Stupid question probably but....

Had a friend call last night for tech support help (like I'm capapble of supporting anyone...) more inside

So anyway, it seems that she isn't able to refresh pages or clear her cache. As I load changes to a web site, she's not able to see them. We've updated, cleared everything we can, set history to 0, etc. When she hits reload on a page, it doesn't give her the new stuff. What gives? And I'm sure it's working, I've tried three different machines at my house, remoted into a friends and it works there..so....

posted by damnitkage to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Firefox on windows?
posted by rhyax at 12:25 AM on August 26, 2004

Try IE (or whatever else is available) on the same machine. Same behavior? If so, you probably have an ISP doing silent caching.

(This drove my then-employer crazy a couple of years ago when their ISP quietly installed a cache. The firm markets almost exclusively via the web, and had a lot of demoware on the site, which their own developers couldn't troubleshoot without going home.)

Otherwise, reinstall the app. Short of that, try creating a fresh profile (firefox.exe -profilemanager). If not on XP, is is possible the profile is in a directory with a very long path?
posted by dhartung at 12:29 AM on August 26, 2004

Sounds like her ISP has a poorly-configured proxy sitting between her and the Web, and it's caching pages to save on bandwidth. Does she have the same issue with other sites or with other browsers?
posted by Danelope at 12:30 AM on August 26, 2004

She doesn't have the issue w/IE as I recall. She's running XP Pro. We did install Firefox 9.3 while I was on the phone w/her and it did alleviate one problem she was having. Her ISP is time warner in Houston and I've not heard of other cable people having the same issue.
posted by damnitkage at 1:21 AM on August 26, 2004

huh, i have time warner houston, they do not cache like that.
posted by rhyax at 1:29 AM on August 26, 2004

The offical firefox support board is here.

You can post/search there and get much better suggestions than here. If its not a proxy issue I would recommend going into the profile and deleting everything in Cache folder.
posted by skallas at 4:03 AM on August 26, 2004