Minor Annoyances with Firefox Development

By Zach Leatherman | Published: March 23, 2008

When you’re developing web applications in Firefox, do you find yourself constantly clearing your cache? Cache is a useful facet of web browsing for everything but the continuous testing environment of web development. Here’s a nice alternative so that you don’t have to disable your cache entirely:

Use the Firefox Plug-In called (humorously enough) JohnnyCache. I added the pattern ‘http://localhost/’ to my preferences and now I don’t have to worry about cache on my local machine anymore. Simple, easy, effective.

Now only if I knew how to disable the Firefox preference that autopopulates form fields with default values when F5 is hit to refresh the page. Try creating a page with a single text field, type a value into the form, and then hit F5 to refresh the page. Your value will be prefilled into the form.

I find myself always hitting “CTRL+L” (goes to the Location Bar) and “Enter” to avoid that one. I looked through about:config, but only found: signon.prefillForms (related to usernames and passwords), and browser.formfill.enable (related to autocomplete dropdowns for forms, not default values).

Anyone know an easier method?

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  • About the Author

    Zach Leatherman is a Professional Front End Engineer. He loves building for the web, and has been contributing to the community through his blog since February 2007. Despite his propensity for software, he has a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering and is currently on the User Experience Team at Union Pacific Railroad. The views expressed on this website do not represent the views of his employer.

    He enjoys spending time with his beautiful wife Traci and their two Great Danes, Roxie and Ella. They also have a cat, a rabbit, goldfish, and one or more tarantulas. Read more »