Can Firefox's “view source” be set to not make

Question

This is sort of tangential to coding, but programmers often do "view source" on their own pages and on others' pages. I learned that when you do the normal View Source in Firefox, it takes the URL you're at and issues another GET request to that URL. There are two reasons why this is bad:

1. If you've just issued a POST and do View Source, you won't see the HTML that your browser is actually rendering for you.
2. If the site author has incorrectly made a form that takes some action (sends email or writes to a DB or whatever), then that action will be taken (or attempted, anyway) again. That's sort of dangerous.

I'd heard there was something I could add to about:config that would prevent this, but had no luck. I also read about some extensions that would get around this, Firebug chief among them, but ctrl-shift-u is so convenient when compared to F12 and then a couple of clicks to find the element you're interested in.

So... Is there a switch I can flip to make Firefox's View Source act like View Generated Source all the time and hit the cache instead of making a new GET request?

Answer 1

To extend @Techn4k's answer: If you have those two properties set, but still get the re-GET or re-POST behavior, clear your browser cache: Go to about:preferences#advanced, click on the network tab, and click clear now (or similar) on the cache information part.

This lets Firefox fetch and cache the page, so that no re-GET or re-POST appears.

Answer 2

This is broken in Firefox for some time now:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=307089

They aren't very responsive on their bug tracker, but your options are:

(1) complain at the bug tracker,
(2) fix it yourself it's open source software,
(3) find another browser.

Answer 3

You do a Ctrl+A, right click and "view selection source", that doesn't re-request the page.

Answer 4

Use the FireBug extension. It displays (and allows you to navigate) only the rendered source, so there is no need for another request (and it shows Javascript changes).

Answer 5

It is upsetting. An alternative to the methods above is to open the debugger using F12, then click the Network tab.

When you browse to different pages, each GET/POST is shown. You can then click on which post you want, and click the Response tab to see the data that was received by the browser.

Answer 6

Type "about:config" in the address bar.

In the filter box, type : "browser.cache"

"browser.cache.disk.enable" and "browser.cache.memory.enable" must be set to TRUE.

Done ! All credit to @MatrixFrog