I use Firefox as my browser, mostly due to recommendations from dopers. I’ve noticed that I often receive the message that “Firefox has prevented this page from reloading.” I don’t know how or why Firefox decides to take this action but, at least in the case of my personal online banking website, it causes me a some inconvenience.
Why does Firefox prevent a page from reloading?
Can I circumvent this?
Should I circumvent this?
Any information will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Prevention from reloading is usually done to prevent actions from repeating.
Normally, when you click a link on a web page, that requests a new URL using the “GET” action. GET actions are assumed to be “side-effect free”, meaning - amongst other things - the browser may keep a copy of that page in memory and show that when you go to the same URL instead of requesting the page again from the server (this is what usually happens when you press the “Back” button on your browser). The browser may also assume it can reload the page without any significant actions happening on the server (when you press the “Reload” button on your browser).
With some forms (like the “reply” form on this message board) there IS something significant happening: it generates a reply on the message board. Those actions should be indicated by using a POST action on the form. POST actions may not be automatically reloaded or cached (though there are a few browsers that do cache POST actions for the purposes of making the “Back” button “work” - I’m not entirely sure that that is a good strategy). The upshot of this is that POST requests, if used naively (that is, by someone who doesn’t know 15 year old techniques to make them behave in decent browsers), will break things like browser history (back button) and prevent reloading of pages.
Your bank’s site should at minimum have some navigation in place so that you don’t have to reload or use the back button. It “should” work when you don’t use those features. It’s annoying and unnecessary, but I’m not surprised; banking websites tend to be clunky as hell in my experience.
My banking website won’t let you use the back or reload buttons, it logs you out if you try. It’s to prevent you accidentally paying a $10,000 bill twice ;). It seems that Firefox is trying to prevent that sort of thing as well.
It looks to me like yes. Have you tried clicking on the browser window’s Help at the top? Then paste in your quoted sentence to find out how you can. I don’t know enough to comment on “Should”. Have you asked your bank about this issue for its other customers?
I’ve talked with the bank “help” people; their best answer is that I should use Internet Explorer. I ain’t gonna do it; I wouldn’t use it even if it worked----the inconvenience isn’t that great.
Since banks are obsessed with security, they really don’t want you to reload, and thus have no reason to make it easier for you to do so. That and the help people probably don’t know anything about the actual underlying system.
I think you are correct; I’ll just learn to live with it. Even so, I didn’t have this problem with the last bank I used.
There are add-ons for Firefox that allow you to use IE routines from right within Firefox for obnoxious websites like this that are only designed for IE. Look for IEview or IEtab or similar.
They are easy to install, and make it quite convenient to deal with IE-only websites within Firefox.
Another helpful tip: 99.9% of “IE-only” sites aren’t. Maybe they were in 1995, maybe the designer is just a moron, but, IME, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome are all good enough now to handle anything the Web is likely to throw at them.
Yeah, but----I still have to go through the “allow” routine whenever Firefox elects to block the page from reloading (or actually finishing loading, it seems to me. It’s a pain in the ass and it seems unnecessary to me. Basically the page loads in blank form and is then supposed to move to the same page in printed form to accept user input but refuses to do it unless I tell it to. I just don’t get why Firefox blocks it at that point. I guess it is one of life’s little mysteries that I will just have to live with, no matter how inconvenient it may be.
Okay–if anyone else has this problem, do this: Go to Tools: Options: Advanced: Warnings: if Warnings is checked, remove the check: problem is solved.