Bear with me, as the Firefox cache has gotten more byzantine over the years so is the question. I am using Firefox 35.0.1 on Mavericks. I want to mess around with the cache. There is a lot of outdated or incorrect information on this topic in the search results from Google.
I want to CLEAR the browser cache, then do something on the web and see what falls into the cache. To that end I thought I'd find the thing, clear the cache from the menu and then do my experiment. Yes, I know I can sort by date and get my latest browser cruft to the top of the list, but a side issue is that the cache doesn't really clear and I need to understand that too.
About:cache
tells me the cache is at:
/Users/<me>/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/<something>.default/cache2
but About:config
has no entry for parent_directory as some help articles claim.
Anyway that location is a lie to begin with, because it actually contains two directories, doomed and entries: doomed contains a bunch of files, and they all have numbers for names, and entries contains a bunch of files with really long names (if I had to bet I'd bet on entries).
OK, now, when I "clear the cache" from preferences there are still a couple hundred files in entries and doomed. They mostly have recent dates. So "clearing the cache" is another lie.
I kind of prefer not to go off the rails and rm files willy-nilly when I really don't know what they are. So could someone explain in excruciating detail this cache structure, including what files the system is hanging on to and why (when I told it to clear the cache), and what is doomed vs. entries?