Why do I constantly have to hit CTRL-F5 at some image sites?

Will Pittenger · Post by **Will Pittenger** » March 18th, 2006, 10:07 pm

There are some image sites where images stop downloading mid-image without any errors being issued by Firefox 1.5.0.1. At first, I dealt with it by not going to problem sites. Later I heard you could hold down Shift while pressing the Refresh button to force FF to ignore the cache. Still later I found that CTRL-F5 did the same thing. However, it got to the point that I remapped with KeyConfig CTRL-F5 to Shift-F5 to be consistant with holding the Shift key down while pressing the Refresh toolbar button.

However, what I want to happen is the following:
1. Force the server to send the full image the first time.
2. If the final image size is not the size listed in the tab (which probably comes from the file header), do not store the file in the cache. So if the image is supposed to be 1000x768 but turns out to be only 1000x100, ensure that an ordinary Refresh (without the Shift or CTRL keys) attempts to reload the image from scratch.

gilloz · Post by **gilloz** » March 18th, 2006, 10:11 pm

Will. Have you tried unchecking the Pop-Up Blocker box under the Content tab in Options? See if that does it for you.

Will Pittenger · Post by **Will Pittenger** » March 18th, 2006, 10:14 pm

How would the two affect one another?

gilloz · Post by **gilloz** » March 18th, 2006, 10:46 pm

Sorry Will. I didn't completely read the whole post. I read the first part and associated it with having to bypass Pop Up Blocker using the CTRL key and Refreshing it with F5 and quickly assumed you were having that particular problem. Out of curiosity, do you get the Gold window below the Tool bar telling you that Firefox could not load the page?

dickvl · Post by **dickvl** » March 19th, 2006, 7:11 am

Try this extension: http://showimage.mozdev.org/

Will Pittenger · Post by **Will Pittenger** » March 19th, 2006, 1:01 pm

I have Show Image. Please reread what I wrote in the first post. This commonly happens when the URL **is** the image. (Rather than a page containing the image.) Part of the image loads, but then either Firefox or the remote server gives up and quits. It can happen even if there is plenty of bandwidth and the image is relatively small (like 400x400).

Will Pittenger · Post by **Will Pittenger** » March 19th, 2006, 1:04 pm

gilloz wrote:Out of curiosity, do you get the Gold window below the Tool bar telling you that Firefox could not load the page?

I do not know what gold window you are talking about. FF does not complain. It acts like the complete image was downloaded without errors.

Old Makondo · Post by **Old Makondo** » March 19th, 2006, 10:25 pm

gilloz,
i get that error page quite often. Thought it has something to do with Adblock/my filters. Do you know anything about it?

Will,
did you have this problem before installing ShowImage? It didn't work for me and i uninstalled it. Maybe that's the problem/

Will Pittenger · Post by **Will Pittenger** » March 19th, 2006, 10:35 pm

I never ran FF without Show Image. (Except when I could not get any extensions to install, but I do not remember if the problem happened then.) I can say that IE used to have same problem. However, since I installed my first Mozilla version, the sites affected (not disclosed for privacy) always end up being loaded outside IE. Now I use IE only for Microsoft sites and not all of those.

Will Pittenger · Post by **Will Pittenger** » March 20th, 2006, 12:47 am

Reproduction idea:

I just remembered that I did encounter the same problem inside a page at one time. Too bad they fixed it. At one time, the site http://www.crh.noaa.gov/ifps/MapClick.p ... L&site=ILX was including the full satellite image as the thumbnail. This caused it and several others to fail in the manner described above.

So you might be able to simulate it by copying the entire page and putting the larger images back in. If you then simulate downloading it at dial-up speeds (which I used at the time), you might just see it. It was not 100% reliable in that regard. Expect it to happen 50% of the time with that page.

dickvl · Post by **dickvl** » March 20th, 2006, 5:36 am

How long does it take to download such pages/images?

Will Pittenger · Post by **Will Pittenger** » March 20th, 2006, 11:05 am

Varies. Some images will appear to be downloading normally -- especially if they have plenty of bandwidth. Then they just stop loading for no apparent reason. It is not like the download timed out.

monkeyman · Post by **monkeyman** » March 20th, 2006, 11:28 am

Will Pittenger wrote:Varies. Some images will appear to be downloading normally -- especially if they have plenty of bandwidth. Then they just stop loading for no apparent reason. It is not like the download timed out.

Thinking about it, a time out doesn't seem that unlikely. Try changing, in about:config, the following:

network.ftp.idleConnectionTimeout 300->600
network.http.keep-alive.timeout 300->600

This can help a great deal with servers that are "load balancing".

Will Pittenger · Post by **Will Pittenger** » March 20th, 2006, 11:31 am

Done. Can you describe how that would impact it?

monkeyman · Post by **monkeyman** » March 20th, 2006, 11:38 am

Well, you have a heavily trafficked server serving images and, in order to server as many guests as possible, the server load balances by occasionally pausing a particular request. The Firefox timeout setting are very conservative by default and, in my opinion, too conservative. Even if this turns out not to resolve your image issues it will help with downloads in general so nothing lost.