How to make Firefox and Cassini fall in love again
I’ve been using Firefox as my default browser of choice long before i started with .net development. Even with latest IE8 developer tools and debugging support i still find Firefox/Firebug most flexible combination in client-side web development.
But, one thing kept bothering me throughout whole time of my asp.net experience: whenever i hit Ctrl + F5 i waited a whole eternity until my page was fully loaded. Compared with any version of IE performing the same task, this was embarrassing fact.
I even blamed Microsoft to make me give up on Firefox just because of that. But i was wrong.
As i found out googling for for a solution to this issue, this issue can be reproduced on a machines which have IPv6 installed. While i was not able to find out where exactly lies the problem (Firefox or Cassini itself) i found out that there are two ways to solve this issue:
1. Disabling IPv6 support in Firefox
Most of the authors that i found out about suggest this approach as quickest and cleanest solution. What you need to do is basically to open configuration settings in Firefox (about:config) and to change network.dns.disableIPv6 setting to true. This is shown at the picture bellow:
2. Change localhost settings in your hosts file
This came to me as an idea to check where and how can i interfere in IPv6 settings on my machine. I saw one of the comments on above mentioned sources saying that one can get rid of the problem by simply replacing localhost with machine name in the url.
It didn’t took me long to check and see that disabling my IPv6 localhost lookup does the same thing as disabling IPv6 directly in Firefox.
What you need to do is basically to comment / delete this particular line in your hosts file:
#::1 localhost
Note: ::1 notation is IPv6 equivalent of the IPv4 127.0.0.1 lookup address.
I believe the second solution might be more suitable for users who do not want to disable IPv6 in general, and the first one for all others that still do not use IPv6 in their regular work.
Hope Firefox users will find this usable.