Firefox problem

November 22, 2004 6:54 AM

Firefox Cache: is it weird, or what?
Surely I should be able to read "C:\Documents and Settings\dad\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.pt4\Cache" in, er, Firefox. Right?

I am trying to rebuild a profile page, viewed and altered but screwed. I reckon it exists in my cache, if I can find it.

In IE6/Win98SE, the cache was fecking obviously placed, files were appropriately named and no such animal as a cache_map had been discovered, yet.

So: how do I interpret the filenames in the above, when they all lok like 1EAE950Fd01, instead of eg., mefi.gif.

And why won't Firefox open the files?

posted by dash_slot- to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Put about:cache?device=disk into the address bar.
Then find the file you want, click on it and check if it has an entry for "file on disk". If it does, DON'T CLICK ON THE URL. It will try load the page and overwrite the cache with the new data.
Go to a command prompt or shell and copy the file somewhere else with a good extention, and open that.
posted by quieter at 7:11 AM on November 22, 2004

Response by poster: Thanks, quieter.

I'm using FF 0.9.1, and there is no such category as file on disk: only these -
Key: http://www.metafilter.com/user/13659
Data size: 22493 bytes
Fetch count: 5
Last modified: 11/22/04 14:25:31
Expires: 01/01/70 00:00:00

I suspect that is the cache of the page I saw just after I modified my userpage, not the page before I modified, which is what I wanted. And google's cache is not comprehensive enough (it has the link, but didn't store the page). Which means I get either the hard copy on the server, or the cached copy on my PC. O well. Ne'er mind.

I kinda prefer a simpler way of handling cache.
posted by dash_slot- at 7:43 AM on November 22, 2004

This isn't helpful for now, but a neat way to automatically keep backups of pages you're working on is to use the Slogger extention. It allows the logging and storing of all pages viewed (with timestamp) so is easy-ish to revert back.
The cache is designed to limit bandwidth by checking etags on HTTP headers, but they probably could have made it a little more user-friendly.
posted by quieter at 8:13 AM on November 22, 2004

I'm using FF 0.9.1, and there is no such category as file on disk: only these -
Key: http://www.metafilter.com/user/13659
Data size: 22493 bytes
Fetch count: 5
Last modified: 11/22/04 14:25:31
Expires: 01/01/70 00:00:00

Click on the Key to see whether it's on disk. You'll see a page like this:


key: http://www.metafilter.com/user/13659
fetch count: 4
last fetched: 11/22/04 13:42:04
last modified: 11/22/04 10:55:37
expires: 04/15/10 12:55:20
Data size: 22493
file on disk: none
Security: This document does not have any security info associated with it.


(In this case, it's not on disk, so you wouldn't be able to get it.)
posted by aberrant at 1:47 PM on November 22, 2004