Gordaen’s Blog

It’s a bit late, so I’ll cut the story down significantly. I was attempting to make my nginx (web server) install play nicely with a front controller PHP setup and became rather frustrated tonight. For some reason, Firefox started to download the index file as a bin(ary). Any time I went to http://example.com/, Firefox would ask if I wanted to save a bin (which was really just a text file containing the HTML that was output by the PHP). I set the default file type to text/html in two locations with no luck. I changed the config file to forward all PHP files to fastcgi. I changed it to forward only the index.php file. I tried dancing like an Egyptian robot, but nothing seemed to work.

No matter what I did, I could not seem to make an iota of headway. I ended up using wget to try to grab the file with headers and I received a 404. It took a moment to click that something was going on. Firefox was regularly returning a file but wget returned a 404 each time. I came to realize that Firefox was caching the page. Any time I went to the URL, Firefox would apparently just try to give me a cached copy of the “bin” file.

After breaking into a neighbor’s apartment and throwing his computer out the window (why would I do mine?), I finally calmed down a little. “Okay, Firefox is stupid but at least now I understand what is going on,” I told my cats. They were suspicious, so I proceeded to remake all of those config file changes that should have worked an hour ago when I first tried them and then confirmed that things were starting to work.

I went to the URL once I knew everything was set up correctly (confirmed in wget and Epiphany) and Firefox still wanted to download the bin. I did F5 and it moved me back one page in my history and reloaded that page. I typed the URL again, saved the bin, and then tried to do a forced refresh (CTRL+R). Firefox once more went back a page and refreshed it instead. I thought I would have to clear my cache, but I ended up being able to close the tab and try a new one successfully. Still, the not bothering to even attempt to contact the server is really bizarre and irritating behavior, so keep your eyes out. Your Firefox might betray you too…