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I see dead pages

The first few times I saw this, I thought I was just mistaken.. but it's happened so many times now I know it's not me, this is really happening: older Firefox pages reappear if I Alt-TAB away and then return to Firefox.

It's Gmail where I can most easily notice this, so it MAY have something to do with Ajax, but I THINK I've seen it on other pages too (confirmed: I just saw it on another page). It's pretty weird: let's say I've opened up in the morning to twenty unread Gmail messages. I read and delete 15 of them, then Alt-TAB off to do something else.. but when I come back, the messages I read or deleted show up as though I had never touched them. They really aren't: a "refresh" shows the correct view instantly, but it's quite confusing.

I know, you probably think I'm nuts - or have two Gmail windows open. It's definitely not the latter, and I don't think that taking my wife's appraisal of my mental state is valid. Really: this happens.

It MAY have something to do with Parallels: it seems like it happens more often if I've Alt-TABbed there.. but it's not repeatable - I've not found anyway to demonstrate this consistently.

Anybody else ever seen this? It might have something to do with running the Firefox 3 Beta too - I'm not sure if this started just after loading that..

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Fri Mar 28 20:44:05 2008:   TonyLawrence


It's not FF3 (I reverted back) and it's not Parallels - it just happened again. I was only working in Terminal - tabbed back to FF and there were 35 messages I had already disposed of!





Sat Mar 29 16:02:10 2008:   JonR


I have had a similar experience with Firefox, though rarely. Apparently it fetches pages from its cache instead of getting the refreshed version, sometimes. At least that's what I've figured was happening. I haven't ever noticed it with GMail, though. I'm using GMail a lot these days and the only glitches (very minor) seem to be strictly GMail-owned, not due to Firefox behavior. I use Xubuntu on my desktop machine and the default Xandros Linux on my little EeePC ultra-portable.



Sat Mar 29 16:39:47 2008:   TonyLawrence


Interesting, thanks.

It's really odd.. you'd think for this to happen at all that it would also have to happen sometimes from just refreshing a page.. maybe it does, but I've never seen thar.

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