What's the difference between F5 and Ctrl-F5 in Firefox related to JavaScript events?

javascript ajax firefox page-refresh
Abel picture Abel · Oct 14, 2011 · Viewed 22.5k times · Source

When you try this public page: http://slim.nl/shop/default.aspx (update: meanwhile this site has changed such that this question's behavior cannot be tested anymore there), you'll notice a menubar. If you hit F5, the menu in that bar disappears. Same when you come to that page via the Back-button in your browser. It only happens on Firefox (seen on versions 3-7). Using Ctrl-F5, the menubar reappears.

To the best of my knowledge, all JavaScript events that fire when loading a page, including any AJAX cycles, should also fire when refreshing a page with F5 or coming there via the Back-button. What's happening here?

I'd like to know from a programmer's standpoint what the difference is between F5 and Ctrl-F5, preferably more general than just this case. Unless it's a bug in Firefox, of course.

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Answer

Alistair Laing picture Alistair Laing · Oct 14, 2011

Ctrl+F5 clears the cached files in browsers where as F5 just refreshes the page but it uses cached files. Eg say you load a page make changes to a css file and upload it press refresh or F5. Page just refreshes and doesn't fetch the new revised css file hit ctrl+F5 it goes it clears the cache for the page and fetches the file again from the server. This would then load the new css file which would display the changes.

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