Last Updated: February 23, 2017
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10.68K
· calamari

Disable the Back-Forward-Cache of Firefox and Safari

Just a quick reminder for myself, and because that kind of code lines (or hacks) are weird. I just have to post it.

Reasoning: If you want to write a one page app, that does not reload a page, but offer a machanism to login via URL parameters, you might dislike the Firefox caching the whole app state of the previous page. Because if logging in as User A and then logging in as User B hitting the back button would just show the app in a state that is logged in as User A with all his data. That feels weird. More weird is the solution to this problem:

// Does nothing but break the bfcache of firefox and safari
// On FF, if you use the login via paramater functionality, hitting back after relogin via params
// would serve the whole page from memory, so that you are essentially look at the page and book stuff
// for the previous logged in user. This should clear that memory cache.
+window.addEventListener('unload', function () {});

It seems that adding an window.unload handler to the page disallows Firefox to store the app state in cache. Why this peculiarity works is a mystery to me. If someone has an explanation, I would like to here it.

And there is, where I've got that idea: https://madhatted.com/2013/6/16/you-do-not-understand-browser-history