I was wondering how, if it all, does firefox cache say, google.com to its respective IP?
Firefox – How does firefox cache DNS requests/replies
browser-cachefirefox
Related Solutions
You can force all requests relating to a refresh to actually be requested from the server (bypassing any already cached content, and updating the cache with the new version) by using Ctrl+F5 instead of just F5.
This does not work for requests made by the page within client-side code though. When that is a problem you need to use the POST method (POST requests should never be cached) instead of GET or add an ever-changing value to the query string (such as the current time in ms).
According to the MozillaZine Knowledge Base article Profile folder - Firefox:
Mac
Profile folders are in one of these locations:
~/Library/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/<profile folder> ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/<profile folder>The tilde character (~) refers to the current user's Home folder, so ~/Library is the /Macintosh HD/Users//Library folder.
This section of that article describes the default cache location. You can also see where it is with this url: about:cache and change it by entering this one: about:config and then changing the preference named browser.cache.disk.parent_directory.
Update:
I haven't updated the screenshot, but this still works in FireFox 15.0.1.
Here's a screenshot of Firefox 13.0.1 running on OSX 0.6.8 (Snow Leopard). As you can see the cache folder has been put in a custom location on another volume using about:config.
Best Answer
It caches it short-term, but I don't know the particulars of the backend. You can see this when DNS doesn't resolve, and you use the refresh button only to find you quickly land on the Server Not Found page again; but, if you click the "Try Again" button on that page, it re-queries the DNS server. Or, if you close and reopen Firefox, the cache will have cleared.
I've found this out through pure experimentation; I've been doing quite a bit of DNS settings changes lately.
This article claims that "In Firefox, by default, the DNS requests are cached for only 1 minute."
but it is dated August 2007, so things may have changed by now.(see below)To control the cache settings, you might try the DNS Cache extension or the Clear Dns Cache extension.
You can also tweak the about:config setting network.dnsCacheExpiration to manually set the cache time; its default is 60 seconds, confirming the above article. Or network.dnsCacheEntries controls the maximum number of cache entries. You will likely need to add these settings to the about:config page yourself (New > Integer), and setting either one (or both) to 0 should disable the cache.