289890 - after completed download, re-downloading saves the file from the cache instead of actually re-downloading

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 138117

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[Aaron Slunt]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050410 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050410 Firefox/1.0+

It appears that after a file is completely downloaded, if you re-download it, it
doesn't re-download, but "downloads" it from the session cache instead. This is
not good, especially if someone wants to re-download a file that was corrupted
during download (as was my case).

This doesn't happen if a cache-control header is set to force a refresh every
click, from my experience.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Download one of the files shown in the url
2. Watch as it takes a few seconds to download
3.Download it again, allowing it to overwrite. Notice how it goes
lightning-fast? It's just taking the download from the cache, not from the site.

Actual Results:  
File cached was saved upon re-download, not the file from the server.

Expected Results:  
Re-downloaded from the server.

Comment 1

[Bruce Armstrong]

It doesn't appear to be limited to the session.  As long as a file with the 
same name is still in the download cache, any attempt to redownload the same 
file will result in it being "downloaded" out of the cache.  That's a 
particular problem if the site hosting the file has updated the file without 
renaming it.  Apparently Firefox has no way to (or does not attempt to) 
determine if the file date of the file on the server is newer than the 
downloaded file.  You have to clear the cache before you can download the more 
recent version of the file off the server.

Comment 2

[allen.attard]

Duplicate of bug 270247 which has been given "unconfirmed" status but also
provides more detail.

Comment 3

[John Vandenberg]

Problem confirmed on FF1.5b1 and SeaMonkey1.0a.

The proposed solution is to remove completed downloads from the cache.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 138117 ***