Webhelp in Firefox is cached very long

[Thomas Grehl]

Hi,

not sure this is really a bug, but I though I'd report it anyhow: we have an internal webhelp that we update frequently. After upgrading to H&M 8 the author noted that changes she just made did not appear in the browser if deliverd by a webserver, opening the HTML files from the windows share have the changes included as expected. I can confirm this, using Firefox. Another colleague who had never opened that page before got the new version right away. F5 and CTRL-R do not help. Using a different browser on the same PC shows the new version of the page.
Is there a difference in how long the pages are supposed to be cached?

thanks,
Thomas

[Martin Wynne]

Hi Thomas,

The only sure way to ensure that everyone sees updated Webhelp pages immediately, or ever, especially in Firefox, is to change to using .php (or .asp, according to your server) file extensions for your Webhelp instead of .html

There is an option in the HTML Export Options for that.

The H&M Webhelp works just fine that way -- browsers don't cache those pages because they are expected, but not required, to contain dynamic content.

cheers,

Martin.

[Tim Green]

The H&M Webhelp works just fine that way -- browsers don't cache those pages because they are expected, but not required, to contain dynamic content.

That's an interesting trick I wasn't aware of. All browsers have become increasingly aggressive about caching in the last couple of years because of their obsession with maintaining the illusion of speed. It's got to the point where it's almost impossible to see updated web pages without doing a hard cache clear and a hard reload. They all now also completely ignore all normal meta tags with commands to NOT cache.

Once you're using PHP, this should also help :

Code: Select all

<?php
// Date in the past
header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT");
header("Cache-Control: no-cache");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
?>

Theoretically it should be possible to do this in meta tags, but those are now always ignored.