June 16, 2004 (This post is more than 2 years old.)

Firefox 0.9 Released (with the same old bug, yea!)

So, I'm an avid Firefox user. I love it. And so far, I'm pretty happy with the 0.9 release. However, Firefox has been plagued by a stupid, and I really mean stupid bug for months now that has not been fixed. What is the bug you ask?

I'm looking at a page that is the result of a form post in our CMS admin.

I click View Source.

.... Firefox says, hey, this is the result of a form post, do you want to repost.

I say cancel.

All I want to do is view the source of the file in the browser.

I don't want to repost. I don't want to perform any kind of HTTP request.

But, since CANCEL does nothing, I hit OK.

And I see the source code for the login form for the CMS Admin, since Firefox is performing a HTTP request w/o any cookies.

To view source.

Yea, that makes sense. Really.

-sigh-

Edited: And let me add to this rant. Why can't I say, "Reload this page and don't send the form data again." Why do I have to resend the form data? Sure the page may break if the application isn't coded correctly, but why not just let me reload??

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Archived Comments

Comment 1 by f posted on 6/16/2004 at 10:36 PM

Well, it is Free and Open Source, so why dont you fix the bug yourself, and contribute it to the base code.

Comment 2 by Raymond Camden posted on 6/16/2004 at 10:47 PM

I'd help if I could, but I wouldn't know where to start. I don't think it is unfair to complain about this bug, especially since it has been in there forever. Just because something is free and open does not mean it is free from criticism. :)

Comment 3 by vitch posted on 6/16/2004 at 11:39 PM

Hmmm - I've been using firefox pretty much fulltime for 6+ months and have never seen any problems like this.
I can def. view source on a submitted form without it trying to resubmit - have you tried Ctrl-U?
Dunno - maybe it's one of the extensions I installed early on but it's not something I've come across...

Comment 4 by Raymond Camden posted on 6/16/2004 at 11:42 PM

I'd consider maybe that it is old code - but I did a complete uninstall for 0.9 because of the changes to extensions.

Comment 5 by Dan G. Switzer, II posted on 6/17/2004 at 1:24 AM

This actually has to do w/the fact that Firefox goes and does a new GET/POST to display the source code (which is pretty lame.) I haven't played around w/it, but I wonder if changing your cache settings would affect the view source code. It's definitely a waste of bandwidth that Firefox hits a site twice to view the source code.

Another idea to workaround this, might be to hit [CTRL][A] to highlight all the content on a page and then right-click on the page and select "View Selected Source Code". I believe this comes from the browser's cache.

Comment 6 by Raymond Camden posted on 6/17/2004 at 3:09 AM

Yep, I had forgotten about the View Selected Source Code. Still, seems offly silly.

Comment 7 by Daniel D posted on 6/17/2004 at 3:39 AM

You might try this tool if you don't already have it. will let you get genereated source also after JS has modified the page if any. http://www.chrispederick.co...

Comment 8 by David posted on 6/17/2004 at 6:37 AM

I think you have every right to complain about the bug, whether or not you plan to fix it. You are helping the Firefox community by simply exposing the bug and making Firefox that much better.

If it makes you feel better. Version 0.9 fixed a buggy/twitchy behavior that bothered me since version 0.6. The buggy behavior was that Firefox would not sustain hovering over a link when the browser window occupied my second monitor. A rather obscure yet annoying behavior, I'm pleasantly surprised to see it fixed.

Comment 9 by Alex Sherwood posted on 6/17/2004 at 2:57 PM

Two letters: IE.

Comment 10 by JJ posted on 6/20/2004 at 8:29 PM

To the Edited portion of your rant: How does a browser "reload" a page that is the target of an HTTP post operation _without_ reposting? To reload (except from cache) the browser has to go and request the page again from the server. To do so without posting data is going to break many pages that are the target of an HTTP post. The rest are going to display different results than if you posted some specific set of data.

Comment 11 by Hugo Ahlenius posted on 6/21/2004 at 9:47 PM

I have downloaded and installed 0.9 but I haven't tested if they fixed a standards-breaking bug that I have been complaining about (and I haven't watched the bugtracker for that).

Try using FireFox in the strictest mode with an xhtml page using a custom dtd -- IE downloads and checks the markup against the dtd, Firefox doesn't (at least not 0.7)

Comment 12 by Chris MacPherson posted on 9/2/2005 at 3:53 PM

I have come accross this problem too. I have also noticed a few other weird things as well...

Sometimes I get a blank screen when I view source, even though I have a loaded page and other times I get the previous loaded page's source. It doesn't really make sense to me. The post above stating that firefox fetches the source from the server does enlighten me a bit though.

I am running windoze pro 64 on an amd64 so thought that might not be helping. Not sure really.

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