Minor Annoyances with Firefox Development

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?

Zach Leatherman is a builder for the web at CloudCannon. He is the creator and maintainer of Eleventy (11ty), an award-winning open source site generator. At one point he became entirely too fixated on web fonts. He has given 79 talks in nine different countries at events like Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference, Jamstack Conf, CSSConf, and The White House. Formerly part of Netlify, Filament Group, NEJS CONF, and NebraskaJS. Learn more about Zach »