207710 - Prefs: Unify all the various caches in one UI

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[benc]

Cache used to be just mem and disk cache, but now we seem to have a lot of
little caches running around.

We seem to have a lot more caches these days, and they seem to be undocumented,
and often they secretly misbehave.

What we need to do is to add them all the the existing cache panel + add reset
buttons so they are discoverable by the user.

The two caches I think we should immediately add are DNS cache and auth cache.
Both of these have been the source of a lot of confusion. People are also
getting in situations where they are forced to restart because the browser
becomes unusable. 

There are probably other caches that exist which I can't think of off the top of
my head. We also might have to add a proxy-availabilty cache (bug 207633)
eventually, so expanding the cache panel to cover all caches would make a lot of
sense.

Comment 1

[Nicholas Allen]

It really seems that if these caches can break, the right thing to do is to code
fix the breakage rather than make users figure out when a cache is broken and
find the magic button to unbreak their browser.

Comment 2

[benc]

these problems should both be solved. Sometimes caches work too well, like the
DNS cache. users need control of caches.

Comment 3

[benc]

RESOLVED/WONTFIX.
Mozilla will live on, but Firefox is the future, and there is a very nice
implementation of what I wanted there.
This is wontfix for 1.7f