I tried googling to help me figure out what's going on, but I can really seem to find a definitive answer. I think the best question I should be asking is Is there a way to force my browser to cache images so I don't have to keep redownloading them over and over again?

This question is inspired by, among several other things, this thread. Every time I click on it, I have to wait several minutes for all the images to load. Granted, I've got usenet downloads going on in the background, and if I pause them I can get those pages to load in 30-40 seconds instead of 3-4 minutes, but still, isn't the point of caching supposed to be to prevent things from being downloaded over and over again?

I am using a clean install of the latest version of Firefox with only 2-3 plugins running. Nothing fancy at all. I tried it in IE as well and get the same behavior. I checked my settings and it looks like caching is enabled. I even upped the default 50MB cache limit to 500MB and that had no effect. Basically I can click on the latest page of that thread, let all the images load, then click to another page and then back to the last page and it starts the process of downloading them all over again. Is there anything I can do to make it not do that?

1/19/2009 12:08:31 AM

Quote :

"This question is inspired by, among several other things, ."

epic omission of post-comma sentence fragment

1/19/2009 12:09:24 AM

fixed. It's amazing how leaving out one > can fuck up a whole post.

1/19/2009 12:10:49 AM

http://www.tweakguides.com/Firefox_10.html

look at this

Quote :

"browser.cache.check_doc_frequency [Integer] (3) - This setting determines how often Firefox checks the page you're viewing against the cached version it holds. By default (a value of 3), Firefox automatically checks and only reloads the page if it seems outdated; a value of 2 will never check and always load the cached version (not recommended); a value of 1 will always check for a newer version of the page; a value of 0 only checks once per session. In most cases the default is fine, however if you want to force Firefox to reload new versions of every page you visit, set this option to 1, though this will slow down browsing. Remember you can manually force reload any page at any time by pressing CTRL+F5 if you think you're viewing the outdated version."

1/19/2009 12:14:40 AM

Mine's at the default of 3.

I wouldn't want to put it at 2, although I suppose that would solve this particular issue.

1 isn't gonna help me.

I just changed it to 0, I'm seeing what that does.

For my own sanity, is what I'm describing happening to everyone else too, or is there something fubar on my browser?

1/19/2009 12:21:57 AM

Alright, looks like changing that value to 0 fixed my issue. Any time I click from one page to another and back to the first, it loads all the cached images without delay. Hopefully that won't screw anything else up.

thx evan.

and then I went and clicked on the thread again and it started re-downloading them all over again.

WTF?

1/19/2009 12:29:15 AM

well fuck

1/19/2009 12:34:26 AM

is it redownloading them, or is that the time it takes the browser to RENDER those images? There's a big difference, and rendering large jpg/pngs is not "fast" at all. Try clicking back and forth with the cache settigns and watching your network activity. If there's no spike, then its a rendering issue, not a caching issue.

1/19/2009 5:18:42 AM

It's definitely redownloading them. It's loading those animated gifs one frame at a time. And with my newsgroup downloads going on in the background, my web surfing only gets 10-20 Kbps of bandwidth, so it literally takes several minutes each time for that page to load if I don't pause my download.

1/19/2009 1:28:43 PM