hi,

i have a wordpress based site, so the design is based on a css file.
it's exhibiting a very strange and annoying problem - in firefox (i tried 3 diffrent versions, all had the problem) the site loads just fine at first. but after about 10-15 loads of the site, the site takes very long to load, and no graphics is displayed. this can be solved temporarily by uninstalling FF and re-installing, but it always comes back. i looked at the site when it's not loading correctly with firebug, and the css tablet sais "There are no rules in this stylesheet."

i thought this problem was actually a problem with my installation of FF, but another user has complained about this happening to him, so it must be a problem with the site itself, or the css itself. i don't understand what could be causing this, but it seems to be some sort of caching problem. (the site works and caches fine in IE and chrome)

my site is:
www.ho-lo.co.il
(it's not in English)

like i said, to try and replicate the problem you would need to load the site multiple times (and maybe try again after an hour or two). if someone with more expirience could maybe try and look at the site with firebug or something, that would be great.

anyway, any insights as to what could be causing this would be great, this problem is driving me mad.

Have you tried validating your CSS with the W3C CSS Validator?? Just to see if there are any errors in there?

Also, make sure your image paths are correct.

Is the site fine in all other browsers? IE7/8, Chrome etc..

i will try validating the css now, although like i said, it works fine at first.

the image paths are correct (again, they load fine the first 10-15 times), and yes, the site works fine in IE 7/8 and in chrome

Are you using @import in your CSS file(s)?

hi ladynred,

i used to use @import in my css file, yes. a few weeks ago i changed it so that there would be no use of @import (to cut loading time) and the problem started after that. today, i tried to return to using the old css with the @import - and again, the first few loads were fine, but after that the problem returned and the css wasn't loaded.

could the fact that i used to have @import and then removed it be causing the problem? (although like i said, returning to the old css didn't help)

No, that wouldn't be the cause.

I guess I don't understand the problem, exactly. Who is going to sit there and hit re-load 10-15 times anyway? At some point, the browser is going to go back to the server to check for updated pages, refreshing 10-15 times in a row just might force that.

You could try the meta tag to control how often the page is cached.

it doesn't have to be someone hiting reload 10-15 times. it just has to be someone visiting the site a certain number of times over the course of a few days. two days ago i tried cleaning out the FF cach, and deleting manually too. i thought that solved the problem, as i entered the site a lot, and navigated netween pages without any problem. but today, when i loaded the site - again it loaded very slowly, and eventually didn't load the css again.

for some reason, after multiple visits, firefox just doesn't load the css.

So use the meta cache tag and add some cache control to it. I really doubt this is a firefox issue. You must also consider that your site is graphics heavy, the home page alone is 445kb, not enormous with broadband, but for some might be slow. You also have 10 scripts running on the page.

it's true that the front page is heavy, but it's not that heavy. and even if it is, i still don't understand why it doesn't load the css.


anyways, how do i use the meta cache tag?

meta cache-control

Is a http-equivalent (http-equiv) instruction which means it can be used to over-ride or replace HTTP Headers.

the syntax is

<meta http-equiv="Cache-control" content="private|public|no-cache|no-store">

The RFC2616 HTTP/1.1 Header Fields
Scroll down to section 14.9

But of course for IE you might have to do something a little different

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/234067


Yep I know this is about FF but people don't always read properly