Firefox 25.0.1 behaving very strangely on OS/X 10.9
I am using Firefox 25.0.1 to develop PHP code using MAMP locally within a Mac running OS/X 10.9.
When I fetch a page with a correct URL like http://localhost:8888/site?taskID=7 all my PHP code executes nicely and I see exactly the page I expect in Firefox. However, simultaneously, the PHP code also seems to be responding to another fetch, with a shortened URL like http: //localhost:8888/site (without the ?taskID=7). Code I put into the PHP to echo text to the screen always appears on the screen from the correct-URL version, and never from the shortened-URL version. However, I can see updates into my database from the PHP code which can only be occurring if both fetches are being performed. I have had the PHP code write $_SERVER[REQUEST_URI] into a database field. I see one entry from 'site' and one entry from 'site?taskID=7' every time I request the page.
I have, on the same machine, accessing the same URL in the same instance of MAMP, a copy of Chrome. When I access the same URL from Chrome, I just see the correct URL being fetched, not the shortened URL.
I see today another question about Firefox 25, OS/X and custom fonts crashing. I am using custom fonts. However, when I took the custom fonts out, I still get this weird behaviour of two fetches for each page refresh, one with the shortened URL.
This seems to be a new behaviour today. I installed 25.0.1 yesterday.
Chosen solution
I have two guesses.
(1) If your page or style sheet contains a blank src or url(), then Firefox may interpret that to be a relative URL with the base address of the page, and request the page again. This would be most consistent with your description of the second request omitting the query string, but I can't think of any reason for it to suddenly occur after an upgrade.
(2) Another reason that Firefox might repeat a request arises when the character encoding is not specified in the response headers or at the beginning of the page. In that case, Firefox will interpret the response using the user's default encoding. If due to a meta tag in the page Firefox later determines that it was applying the wrong encoding, it will re-request the page. This is not a new issue, but perhaps something in the update changed your default encoding so you are experiencing this for the first time. On the other hand, the modified URL is more consistent with problem #1.
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Chosen Solution
I have two guesses.
(1) If your page or style sheet contains a blank src or url(), then Firefox may interpret that to be a relative URL with the base address of the page, and request the page again. This would be most consistent with your description of the second request omitting the query string, but I can't think of any reason for it to suddenly occur after an upgrade.
(2) Another reason that Firefox might repeat a request arises when the character encoding is not specified in the response headers or at the beginning of the page. In that case, Firefox will interpret the response using the user's default encoding. If due to a meta tag in the page Firefox later determines that it was applying the wrong encoding, it will re-request the page. This is not a new issue, but perhaps something in the update changed your default encoding so you are experiencing this for the first time. On the other hand, the modified URL is more consistent with problem #1.
Your first suggestion, a blank src, could be the case - I do compute the src for some images and do not check that it is nonblank. Yes, the blank src was the problem. That happened to change at the same time I updated to 25.0.1. That was a very confusing problem - thanks very much for the help!
Modified by macuser224