Question

Is there any way to disable this ‘feature’?

For example, if a request is made to http://localhost/foo.html that I have specified to ‘301’ to the root address, all subsequent requests to foo.html bypass the web server completely and ffox 5 will check it’s cache, read that this url was ‘301’ed previously and redirect without even checking for a change.

If i have stopped foo.html from 301’ing, I have to clear firefox’s cache in order to ‘fix’ this from happening.

Chrome, IE and previous version of Firefox do not do this.

Answer 1

301 is just a normal cacheable response code. http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.3.2 says:

This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise. 

So if you don’t want it cached, your server needs to indicate otherwise through the normal headers used to control cache behavior.

You can also clear the cache manually.