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September 19, 2006

Firefox not caching?

Recently my Firefox browser stopped caching. I'm not sure exactly when, but it was around the time of my ADSL upgrade, so at first I thought my connection was just a bit screwy. It soon became evident that this wasn't the problem though. The symptoms were sloooow loading of pages, most evident on things like forums where lots of little identical icons were loaded incredibly tediously, one after the other. The back button would take an age too.
I discovered the fix yesterday. I then found that my mate Tommy had the exact same problem, so I thought it would be useful to publish the fix:
Type about:config into the address bar. You'll get a list of settings, with the ones that have been changed from default values highlighted in bold. I found two entries relating to caching that were set to false - browser.cache.disk.enable and browser.cache.memory.enable. Right-click the entry and select 'reset'.
That's it - full speed should be restored.
I've no idea how this happened in the first place. It may have been induced by a 1.5.x upgrade. Who knows...

Posted by Jez at 05:26 PM | Comments (3)