For a project I'm working on we are having to integrate a feature that uses a .swc provided by the client. This feature, which we are merely integrating and didn't have technical control over the implementation, requires that the Flex application run from a Web server (from an http directive, not from a file directive) in the browser or it won't work. I thought that was annoying, but I realized just how annoying it really was after I ran it from Apache (which I just installed on my machine for this purpose) and my new trace statements didn't show up. After a few minutes I realized it was because the .swf was cached by Firefox. I could clear the cache every time just before running the application. But that was not a very workable solution. instead, I wanted to disable caching entirely.

The way I found to disable caching from Firefox is to run Firefox and in the address bar type about:config. This will take you to a page with a datagrid and a bunch of configuration settings for Firefox. I set browser.cache.disk.enable and browser.cache.memory.enable both to false.

That was all I had to do to disable caching. Oh, and it does occur to me that I *could* have customized the .html template FlexBuilder is using in order to load the .swf with a unique query string value each time, which would have solved the caching issue in a different way. But disabling caching in Firefox entirely seemed far more silly. Plus, it required far less work.