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I have a limited data-plan. Is it possible to have the cached page loaded when I select previously accessed pages rather than them being downloaded again?

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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During a session if I select a previously accessed page from the history or use the back/forward button the page is reloaded. Is it possible to have FF use cached pages during an online session?

I'm aware I can select Work-offline but this would mean turning it off everytime I wish to access a non-cached page or pressing the Try Again button (which disables Work-offline) and repeating the process ad nauseam.

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During a session if I select a previously accessed page from the history or use the back/forward button the page is reloaded. Is it possible to have FF use cached pages during an online session? I'm aware I can select Work-offline but this would mean turning it off everytime I wish to access a non-cached page or pressing the Try Again button (which disables Work-offline) and repeating the process ad nauseam. .

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Firefox has a setting that should help with this, but I don't know how much effect it will have. In part, success depends on websites marking the pages as cacheable.

More information:

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use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-developer/ to disable external images (or all images), javascrpits and toggle caching settings and block unwanted connections to third party-sites with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy/

and you'll fit in your internet plan

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Hi jscher2000.

Would setting "2 - always use cache" result in frozen pages i.e. never downloading a new copy? Will pressing Reload force this?

The current setting is '3 - Check for a new version when the page is out of date'. By 'out-of-date'. I assume it means different from the cached version and is affected by pages with dynamic content such as ads which will in effect make this setting somewhat useless as the page is never the same which is exactly the problem I have.

Setting '0 - Check for a new version of a page once per session (a session starts when the first application window opens and ends when the last application window closes)' seems to be what I'm looking for.

Thanks for bringing these settings to my attention.

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Hi HoovaDevil, I have not experimented with setting 2, but I would guess that reloading with Ctrl+Shift+r, which forces Firefox to bypass the cache, would allow you to work around that. Not sure about a regular Ctrl+r.

My understanding of "out-of-date" is that Firefox would use the date specified by the server when sending the page or file. Some files that rarely change may have a 1 week expiration or later, while files that constantly change expire immediately upon receipt and need to be re-requested in all cases. However, I haven't tested that myself.

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