80731 - Customized cache expire times

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, enhancement)

Description

[Dennis Andersen]

One future I would like is a setting that allows the user to customize the cache
expire times.

This could be done with the following setting in the preferences dialog:

Cached items/webpages expires after X days.

Comment 1

[gordon]

How would you want to use this feature?  Would you want to use it to hold onto 
things longer than the server has indicated, or would you want to expire content 
sooner than the server indicates?  Or do you want to ignore the server entirely?

Comment 2

[Dennis Andersen]

Personally I would like to hold onto things longer than the server indicates,
but I think the user should decide if he want to expire cached items sooner or
later than the server indicates.

Comment 3

[gordon]

cc'ing darin because of implications for HTTP.

Comment 4

[gordon]

*** Bug 81639 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[gordon]

tenthumbs comments from bug 81639:

Mozilla seems to have a default cache expiration time for disk objects 
that don't have their own. I think this should be user configurable. A 
user might want objects to expire an hour, a day, a week, or months or 
years from now. A user on a slow link might well set her disk cache to 
250MB and want to keep the data around as long as possible. Someone on a 
fast link might want a quick expiration. FWIW, Opera has this feature.

Comment 6

[Darin Fisher]

-> this is an http bug

Comment 7

[Darin Fisher]

-> me 

Comment 8

[Darin Fisher]

Here's an exerpt from section 13.4 of RFC 2616:

  If there is neither a cache validator nor an explicit expiration time 
  associated with a response, we do not expect it to be cached, but certain 
  caches MAY violate this expectation (for example, when little or no network 
  connectivity is available).

Our current behavior is to assign such content a zero freshness lifetime. 
According to the spec, it would seem that we could assign actually choose any
freshness lifetime for this, so yes... i would agree... this sounds like it
would make a nice feature/user-pref.

Comment 9

[Darin Fisher]

-> future

Comment 10

[Jo Hermans]

see also bug 152843 for a simpler solution

Comment 11

[Michael T. Babcock]

A few features that would be nice relating to this:
 - offer a URI construct that accesses cached objects; "x-localcache://foobar.html"
 - when checking whether to expire an object because its about to be refetched,
only remove the cached object if the new object is available.  If the new object
is not available (server busy / gone / dns failure / etc.), display the cached
content with a notice in the status bar _or_ give a link to the cached url (see
my comments on bug 8345).
 - offer a button (probably on the page info window; which should have a button
on the main chrome, imho) to expire all objects from the current server.

Comment 12

[Darin Fisher]

-> default owner

Comment 13

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

addon territory