725541 - Inaccurate error message when a page in session history isn't in the cache

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Navigation, defect)

Description

[Zack Weinberg (:zwol)]

The "notCached" neterror long message

<p>The requested document is not available in Firefox's cache.</p><ul><li>As a security precaution, Firefox does not automatically rerequest sensitive documents.</li><li>Click Try Again to rerequest the document from the website.</li></ul>

appears to have originally been intended to come up when you navigate back to a POST response that isn't in the cache despite being in the session history.  It's not a great error message for that case -- users associate sensitive documents with HTTPS, not with being the result of a form submission; Firefox is perfectly happy to reload an HTTPS GET if it needs to -- but that's not the real complaint here: the real complaint here is that you can get this message under conditions that have nothing to do with form submission *or* HTTPS, such as

* I have the cache completely turned off and I'm in offline mode.
* We hit one of the combinations of cache-control headers and HTTPS that cause the page to never have been cached in the first place, and I'm in offline mode.

Either of those cases is likely to make the user think "wtf? this document isn't sensitive."

I recommend deleting the sentence 

# As a security precaution, Firefox does not automatically rerequest sensitive documents.

Maybe replace it with something about POST *if* we can tell that the missing page is the result of a POST.

Comment 1

[Zack Weinberg (:zwol)]

Note that you can also trigger this on view-source, e.g.

* disable the cache completely
* load a page
* activate offline mode
* view source