this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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[fixed, caused by filter list within uBlock Origin] What happened to the back history caching in 120 or 121? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I updated my firefox from 119.0.1 to 121.0 two days ago, and have noticed a for my usage quite significant change:
When I have a page, say a search engine query or a gallery of links on a page, and I open one then go back, previously I got the cached version. Within reason of the cache size I could go back a few pages even days later and critically see them as they where, just like I would expect for a tab I have open.

I use this behavior to work through essentially todo lists, so now that the lists get reloaded every time I visit them, this combines with server side caching to make the list jump around quite annoyingly.
My expected behavior would be the cached back history being served when available, except when I manually hit F5.

Was this change intentional? Is there any way to get the old behavior back?

Edit:
It seems to be a bug and only happen on some profiles, potentially dependent on some metric related to heavy use, like number of open tabs and windows.
Edit:
It seems to be related to uBlock Origin.
Edit:
It is definitely an issue within ubo, I will add a link to the issue there when I create it.
Edit:
It seems to be caused by the "AdGuard Tracking Protection" filter list within ubo.
Edit: issues:
ubo filters: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/21841
AdguardFilters: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/170172
Edit:
It was fixed a few minutes ago, the changes should percolate through to ubo soon™. Thx Yuki2718.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Thanks for not only posting your issue, but also updating with newly discovered information. I wasn't aware that uBlock can prevent caching.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I have now tried this behavior on more profiles and devices (originally I tested on 2 profiles), and it it seems this behavior isn't universal. On the same device (gentoo linux) and a laptop (windows 10) I do not see this behavior. One profile (my main profile) has many historic changes, the other though is quite new and not very unconventional settings wise. Both see this issue. The third profile on the same device is basically empty, only used for testing a few times.
However the win10 profile is a fork of my main profile from 1.5y ago, and should thus be similar in usage and configuration weirdness, yet it works just fine. The only Idea I have right now is it being related to the number of tabs open, since the two profiles seeing the issue have probably over 100 over multiple windows, while the other two only have a single window with maybe 10-20 tabs. Through opening a number of heavy tabs I could not recreate this yet. A restart doesn't fix it either, meaning the tabs in their unloaded state would still contribute if that were the cause.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I have Pinned it on uBlock Origin.
ubo seems to prevent creation of cache for pages while it is active.
Testing around with enabling and disabling addons, I saw the issue disappear. I then reenabled all addons and the issue was still gone. So I restarted and it came back. Then I disabled one after another, and got to it being ubo. I then tried disabling it, loading a "gallery page" and an entry on it, then reenabling ubo. The pages were still cached, but visiting a different entry would reload that one every time. Same for any other newly opened "gallery" and "entry" pages.
This explains why this didn't happen in the test profile, which has no addons installed, but the mirrored profile on the laptop does have ubo and ff on the same version, however I do not observe the behavior there. I will investigate further.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Actually it happens on the forked profile too now, restarting ff did not clear the cache there and it only occurs on newly opened pages now, so what I assume happened was I initially tested while ubo was not yet updated, since the laptop has been sleeping for a while. The browser generated a bunch of cache entries for my test pages and those continued working when ff updated ubo. Clearing the cache now has it break on all pages and fix itself when ubo is disabled like on the other device.
Therefore this seems like a clear ubo issue, independent of platform and other factors. All 3 affected profiles have similar ubo config, so I'll investigate that now. However it is not a firefox issue, I will move the issue elsewhere.

[–] Carighan 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Hrm, I have not noticed any such change, at least not actively.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I have now found instances it doesn't happen for. It might be related to the number of open tabs, or some other indicator of recent heavy usage.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Do you have ubo installed? If not, could you try installing it and see if you can recreate it then? Specifically version 1.54.0. You'll have to find a new test page or clear cache after ubo has been enabled.

[–] feef 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Did you find the cause?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Yes, I just updated the post, you can see the process in my various comments.
It seems to be caused by uBlock origin, though I haven't yet investigated deeper. It might be the combination of the firefox version and the ubo version, and it may be dependent on a specific setting within ubo, I don't know yet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I found it is fixed when I disable the "AdGuard Tracking Protection" list. It can also be "fixed" by setting cacheControlForFirefox1376932 to unset or no-cache in advanced settings, but I don't think that's a good idea to do.