756829 - Firefox automatically changes requested URL in address bar (related to caching)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Mark]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0
Build ID: 20120420145725

Steps to reproduce:

Having a server config that responds differently to "mydomain.org/a" and "mydomain.org/a/" (a file ressource or a directory handled with mod_rewrite)(domain is just an example)

Request the subdirectory URL "mydomain.org/a/" once.
Now try to open "mydomain.org/a"



Actual results:

"mydomain.org/a" is not requested.
URL changes automatically and "mydomain.org/a/" is requested again, which happens as long as the Firefox cache is not cleared.


Expected results:

"mydomain.org/a" should have been requested
Automatically changing a valid URL is not acceptable!

I don't know how to reproduce, but Firefox somehow cached a request/response to/from "mydomain.org/a/?path=b"
Now when trying to access "mydomain.org/a" Firefoxed changed it to "mydomain.org/a/?path=b" automatically, while a request to "mydomain.org/a/" is not changed.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

I can not reproduce this with Seamonkey trunk
http://matti.no-ip.org/bug756829/a/
http://matti.no-ip.org/bug756829/a

Comment 2

[Mark]

For testing:
http://murkymind.mu.funpic.de/a  : server redirects to another file
http://murkymind.mu.funpic.de/a/ : server responds with index file of dir

Click the second link once, and the first cannot be requested anymore in Firefox 12.0 => bug

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

The example from comment #2 works for me with Firefox12 and Seamonkey trunk
I get "another file" with the first link and "index file of requested directory" with the second URL.

Are you sure that you don't have a redirect (301/302) from /a to /a/ in your cache ?

Comment 4

[Mark]

My description was not quite correct.
Firefox probably hashes the responses of both links and assumes that it will lead to the same responses for all times (as long as the disk cache is not cleared).

So first I deactivated mod_rewrite ("RewriteEngine off") for the first link in the server's "httaccess", requested both links => same response. Then I activated mod_rewrite ("RewriteEngine on") which would lead to different responses and Firefox refuses to request the first URL.

New test links, open in this order:
1. http://murkymind.mu.funpic.de/rewriteon.php => open both links on that site, note the server's redirection for "a" to "a/b.txt"
2. http://murkymind.mu.funpic.de/rewriteoff.php => again open both links
3. http://murkymind.mu.funpic.de/rewriteon.php => note "a" is replaced automatically with "a/" as long as the cache remains, also you cannot reload "a" to update the cache, only clearing the cache helps.

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

http://murkymind.mu.funpic.de/a

Status: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Length:	876	
Date:	Sun, 20 May 2012 15:04:40 GMT	
Connection:	close	
Location:	http://murkymind.mu.funpic.de/a/	
Server:	Apache/2.2.16 (Debian) mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.1	
Content-Type:	text/html; charset=iso-8859-1	
Keep-Alive:	timeout=10, max=1000

You have now a redirect from /a to /a/ in your cache. This cached entry will be of course used in the future because caching of the 301 isn't forbidden by the http headers in the 301.

I don't see a bug here.
It's known that you can only clear this by deleting the cache. You get the same issue that only a cache clear helps if you have a URL with a wrong content-type that triggers a download dialog. After changing the content-type on the server you have to clear the disk cache. There is no good way in the UI to do this easier. CTRL+F5 helps in all other cases.

Comment 6

[Mark]

You are right.
This report can be closed then.