Firefox has a setting that should help with this, but I don't know how much effect it will have. In part, success depends on websites marking the pages as cacheable.

More information:

• Browser.cache.check doc frequency - MozillaZine Knowledge Base (2 = always use cache)
• About:config - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-developer/ to disable external images (or all images), javascrpits and toggle caching settings and block unwanted connections to third party-sites with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy/

and you'll fit in your internet plan

Hi jscher2000.

Would setting "2 - always use cache" result in frozen pages i.e. never downloading a new copy? Will pressing Reload force this?

The current setting is '3 - Check for a new version when the page is out of date'. By 'out-of-date'. I assume it means different from the cached version and is affected by pages with dynamic content such as ads which will in effect make this setting somewhat useless as the page is never the same which is exactly the problem I have.

Setting '0 - Check for a new version of a page once per session (a session starts when the first application window opens and ends when the last application window closes)' seems to be what I'm looking for.

Thanks for bringing these settings to my attention.

Hi HoovaDevil, I have not experimented with setting 2, but I would guess that reloading with Ctrl+Shift+r, which forces Firefox to bypass the cache, would allow you to work around that. Not sure about a regular Ctrl+r.

My understanding of "out-of-date" is that Firefox would use the date specified by the server when sending the page or file. Some files that rarely change may have a 1 week expiration or later, while files that constantly change expire immediately upon receipt and need to be re-requested in all cases. However, I haven't tested that myself.

See also:

• ScrapBook: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/scrapbook/