Can Firefox's "view source" be set to not make a new GET request?

firefox firefox-3
Ben Hamill picture Ben Hamill · Mar 4, 2009 · Viewed 7.5k times · Source

This is sort of tangential to coding, but programmers often do "view source" on their own pages and on others' pages. I learned that when you do the normal View Source in Firefox, it takes the URL you're at and issues another GET request to that URL. There are two reasons why this is bad:

  1. If you've just issued a POST and do View Source, you won't see the HTML that your browser is actually rendering for you.
  2. If the site author has incorrectly made a form that takes some action (sends email or writes to a DB or whatever), then that action will be taken (or attempted, anyway) again. That's sort of dangerous.

I'd heard there was something I could add to about:config that would prevent this, but had no luck. I also read about some extensions that would get around this, Firebug chief among them, but ctrl-shift-u is so convenient when compared to F12 and then a couple of clicks to find the element you're interested in.

So... Is there a switch I can flip to make Firefox's View Source act like View Generated Source all the time and hit the cache instead of making a new GET request?

Answer

TJ L picture TJ L · Mar 4, 2009

If you install the web developer toolbar extension, there's an option under "View Source" called "View Generated Source" which will show you the current source of the page, including any DOM changes you may have made.

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