258073 - Firefox/Mozilla incorrectly caches old files even if new file changes

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Core :: Networking: Cache, defect)

Description

[George]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3

This issue occurs in Mozilla 1.x as well but not in any other browser/IE 5+.
Basically documents which are linked from the outside are cached and the cached
copy is preserved if the file name matched, EVEN if the file content has
changed. This doesn't happen every time and in fact it appears Firefox tries to
verify whether the document has changed but sometimes doesn't get it right.
FYI, I am using FreeBSD 4.6 with Apache 1.3.31 and vintage Perl 5.6.

I have had two different occasions where the above occured:
1) on my astro site, if a user creates an image chart and then changes the birth
information (which leads to a different chart being generated, but with the same
file name), the cached copy is loaded and the user is shown the wrong chart;

2) I am creating a file manager which links in an external java script source
from a .js file (linked through a <SCRIPT language="JavaScript"
type="text/javascript" src="/filemgr.js"></SCRIPT>). If the content of
filemgr.js changes, the new copy is not downloaded and the application bombs as
a result of trying to reference content from the old copy.

Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a document which links to a resource with a defined name, either through
an IMG or SCRIPT tag as in the above;
2. Load the page into the browser at least once using the Mozilla/Firefox web
browser (this loads the externally-linked document)
3. Change the content of the external document; reload the page in Firefox.
After a certain point the change in the actual document will not be relayed down
to Firefox and instead the old copy will be shown.

Actual Results:  
I am looking at Firefox telling me "function dpcd() doesn't exist" (for
JavaScript) when the filemgr.js file contains the dpcd function.

Expected Results:  
It should have executed the content of the dpcd() function - IE 5 does this
without a problem. Currently I have the function alert a string to verify it
runs and the string is message box'd to the screen in IE but it causes an error
in Firefox's JavaScript console.

Server: 
450 MHz AMD K6-2, 384 MB PC 100 SDRAM
FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE using default Perl interpreter (comes with FreeBSD 4.6)
Apache 1.3.31/Unix

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

I myself have rarely experienced this problem, and when I have, it was a server
side issue.

What size is your cache set to? If you empty the cache and reload, do you get
the new copy? What about with Shift+Reload?

Comment 2

[George]

Clearing the cache (from firefox) immediately fixes the problem. I have
not tried shift-reload yet though.

Comment 3

[John Faughnan]

I'm particularly seeing this problem with pages embedded in iframes. Consider
this page:

http://www.faughnan.com/news.html

It's easy to download the components and study this locally. It consists of a
page with an iFrame. The iFrame embeds another page which itself is dynamically
generated (blogroll from bloglines, javascript load).

Even when the embedded page is changed, Firefox always loads the old version.
The only way to get it to load the new version was to completely flush the
Firefox cache. Reload didn't work. IE 6 loads correctly.

Comment 4

[Ali Ebrahim]

--> Browser: Networking: Cache

Comment 5

[Radek 'sysKin' Czyz]

(In reply to comment #3)
> I'm particularly seeing this problem with pages embedded in iframes. Consider
> this page:
> 
> http://www.faughnan.com/news.html

Well the server claims that the iframe was last modified on 13th October and
will expire on 20th October. Today is the 19th.
If that works in IE then it's IE bug - firefox is clearly following
cache-control directives sent by the server, at least in this case.

Comment 6

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

invalid per comment 5.

Comment 7

[benc]

V/invalid.