Firefox 3 mulitple ajax requests not updating

Posted by Lee under CodeIgniter, Programming

This morning I managed to get caught up trying to work out a problem I was facing with some content that was being updated via ajax (using jQuery). Whenever I went to perform the same action/url twice it wouldn’t update - in my case a toggle switch for displaying an item. It seemed to be a caching problem but (suprisingly) IE7 worked fine so it started to point towards something wrong with Firefox 3.

After a quick search around I found I wasn’t alone with encountering the problem with a thread on Mozillazine discussing the same issue which then lead me to a bug report covering the same problem.

The culprit - FireBug

I started to see a few posts in the bug report indicating that when you disable firebug (a FireFox plugin that most web developers have turned on - especially when trying to work out problems like this!) that the issue is no longer there. I gave it a go and sure enough the problem was gone.

FireBug for FireFox 3 is still in beta version and the current version that the problem is happening with 1.2.0b7 was only released a couple of weeks ago.

The solution - downgrade

I went hunting for an earlier beta version and still had the problem in beta 6, but managed to find a beta version that didn’t have this problem - beta 4.

I got it from the following site but the file to look for if wanting another mirror is firebug-1.2.0b4-fx.xpi

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/addons/1843/

**Update 1**

I did a bit more investigation and came across a way to still use the latest beta version (as I certain there would be a few bug fixes) and not encounter this problem. What you need to do is disable the ‘Net’ panel in firebug and the problem is gone!

**Update 2**

Got excited that there was a new beta release (13) on 18th August only to find this same problem persisting. You would think that something as major as this would have been fixed within 5 beta releases! Additionally here is a link to the issue being seen by many others as well still.

I also made a test page so the developers can see exactly what is going on which is located here. Just turn on the console and net panels in firebug and you will see it stop working.