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In Firefox (7.0.1) some pages are not updating. Example: The IP needs to be changed frequently for some testing, and going to a site like whatismyip.com will shows the old ip (the one that was first used when visiting). Changing the ip and going back to the site will not change the ip displayed on the site. But visiting it with IE WILL show the updated IP.

I've told him to empty firefox's cache, cookies, but that has done nothing

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  • Some of these "show IP" -sites are quite dodgy nowadays. You could check out another address, such as automation.whatismyip.com/n09230945.asp Nov 7, 2011 at 19:41
  • … or you could simply use ipconfig/ifconfig (or whatever GUI settings utility you have) to obtain the IP address(es) that your network interface is currently assigned from your network interface directly without all of the extra layers and additional mechanisms — and, as you are experiencing, scope for introducing all kinds of extra problems — interposed by using a WWW browser as a diagnostic tool.
    – JdeBP
    Nov 8, 2011 at 0:25

3 Answers 3

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The last time I had this happen to me was two weeks ago and I still haven't completely figured it out just yet. With that said, here's what I did and maybe it will work out for you. There might be a better, more complete and less destructive way to do this but this doesn't happen very frequently for me to test.

It's a two step process.

First, get Firefox to forget about the site, everything. You can do this by going to your history, right click on a link to a page on the domain you want to forget, and select Forget About This Site. After you do this, close Firefox.

Now you want to kill any traces of the old page from Windows' DNS cache. Go to the command prompt (Win + R, cmd) and enter the command ipconfig /flushdns. After this close it as we're done.

The next time you start up Firefox and visit that site, it should now (hopefully) be the most recent version and not a cached copy.

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  • Since you were able to run IE, I'm assuming here you are running some version of Windows. Nov 9, 2011 at 20:17
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Most Firefoxes don't misbehave this way. That particular one does because somebody configured it that way. That setting was originally intended to be a performance vs. accuracy tradeoff; nowadays it's mainly a way for folks to shoot themselves in the foot. With that configuration, the only ways to get a current copy of the page are Shift-ClickRecirc or key Ctrl-F5.

There's a setting in Firefox to control when to check for a stale cache. Probably in very old versions of Firefox it was easily visible under Tools->Options. Nowadays it's less visible. In the adddress bar type about:config, accept the warning, and go to the setting browser.cache.check_doc_frequency. Values are 0 (check once per session), 1 (check every time the page is accessed no matter what), 2 (never check no matter what), or 3 (check when the cached copy of the page says it might be out of date).

Given your description, somebody has changed it to "2". Change it back to the default "3". (Or if the computer is really old and slowness is a major concern, try "0", as it's a more reasonable compromise than "never".)

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Usually the pages are refreshed after closing firefox. This involves closing possibly multiple firefox windows. After this the firefox normally refreshes the content of most pages unless the firefox settings have been modified, such as

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.check_doc_frequency

Usually F5 and ctrl-R work just fine. Once I had weird behaviour in Firefox but it was because there had been an update downloaded and it wasn't applied yet.

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  • Firefox is closed and opened, cache and cookies cleared too. Days can go by and the pages are still the same. He's no using a tool to check the ip without going to a site, but we're both curious now as to why this problem is happening at all. Nov 8, 2011 at 0:57

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