492230 - About:cache needs a way to download cached data directly from the cache

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Dan Weiss]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1b4) Gecko/20090423 Firefox/3.5b4 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1b4) Gecko/20090423 Firefox/3.5b4 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

When you use about:cache to see information about a cache entry, you can get the URL of the original item, and see a hex dump of the item.

Having the URL of the original item is not enough to get the original item directly from the cache.  The remote server may reject a URL which has expired, or does not have the referer or post data it is expecting.

The hex dump is problematic.  The item in the cache may be a 5MB .MP3 file, or even a 100MB .flv file.  Firefox runs very slowly when generating the text for the hex dump of the file.

Firefox needs a URL scheme and link to get the actual cached data directly out of the cache.

Put another way:
I've seen websites with a Flash-based MP3 jukebox.  The sites have no provision for downloading the MP3s outside of the jukebox.  I want to save the MP3s out of Firefox's cache.  The current about:cache system doesn't allow that, because the server rejects additional attempts to get the MP3 from its URL other than the first request.  The hex dump of an MP3 file also takes a very long time to generate.  The only way I managed to get the MP3 was to reconstruct the file from the hex dump, deleting the text dump with a text editor.  Not very user friendly.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

This is a mass search for bugs which are in the Firefox General component, are
UNCO, have not been changed for 500 days and have an unspecified version. 

Reporter, can you please update to Firefox 3.6.10 or later, create a fresh profile, http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/managing+profiles, and test again. If you still see the issue, please update this bug. If the issue is gone, please set the status to RESOLVED > WORKSFORME.

Comment 2

[chAlx]

Reproduced in SeaMonkey.
BTW it is a more detailed dupe of Bug 188448.