The browser Firefox has a peculiar behavior no other browser has. When I tell it to save an image from a web page which it has loaded, it starts downloading it from the web even though the image is already displayed on the page. All other browsers just save the cached images when the users intend to save them. Why doesn't FF do the same? Is there a way to tell FF to save the cached image (and not download it again) when I click Save?

I hope the question was clear. Thanks in advance for any suggestions or workarounds.

Hi LH

Yes I want to save the image (picture file like GIF, JPG, PNG, etc.) to the disk. The files are always downloaded again, no matter whether I use the built-in download-manager (or whatever it is called, sorry I don't know its exact name) of FF or an add-on like DownThemAll.

Is the page cached as a whole, like an MHT or ZIP or some other archive file? Well, in that case, probably the image would have to be downloaded again since not all archive types allow individual files to be extracted. But I have one doubt. If that were the case, then I must be able to save a complete page instantaneously, which is not the case. As you can check, saving the complete page again initiates the download of each individual element (pictures, HTML files, CSS, JS, etc.) again. Why is that the case if the whole page is already cached?

Maybe this is again due to the fact that the users normally wanna save the page in HTML format (with the other elements like images etc. as separate files), and not as a whole mass. But then, it's a very bad strategy on the part of Mozilla (if it really caches the whole page as a single file, which I don't know). No other browser caches the page as a whole.

Sorry if I went off-topic. I hope I provided the info that you asked for. Please ask anything again if I'm not clear. Thanks.

I almost determined that's not the same case. The program file's download starts again because:

It's not cached,

The server doesn't support resumption of downloads,

The download link changes with time or with every click (a script, most likely server side, does this with the aid of a random 32 or 64 charactered string).

Since these reasons are not specific to the browser, so a program file would start downloading again in ALL the browsers, provided any of the above conditions is fulfilled. But that is not the case with the image files. Other browsers copy them from cache when saved. Only FF downloads them again.

OK. To get a more solid feel of what I'm trying to explain, please load a web page with some image on it in FF and in another browser of your choice. Let the page (and the image on it) load fully. Now try to save the image on both the browsers. You'll realize what I mean. (The image should be big enough, or the connection should be slow enough, so that you know when it starts downloading again.)

The situation is the same with all the images on the image, means you can take any webpage with ANY image. Let me explain it more fully. Open any webpage with some image on it. Let it load fully in the browser. Once it's been loaded, the image on it has been downloaded to the cache folder (or in the RAM), right? (That's how we're seeing it on the page.) So the image is already on our computer.

Now, in any browser other than FF, when you right click the image and click Save Image (or a similar command), the browser copies the image from the cache/RAM to the location you specify.

In case of FF, it starts downloading the image again! It doesn't make use of the image already downloaded to the computer's cache/RAM. That is what I'm trying to point out.

If I'm still unclear, please just leave this topic. I think it's a mistake on Mozilla's part. They keep on getting new features on the newer versions without getting even the BASIC features to work first! They have to realize that the users can live without all the eye candy they're trying to introduce for the upcoming versions (especially when all of that can already be done via add-ons), but the basic features need to be fixed first. How many times have you noticed that FF cannot save or print a web page right? Anyway, that was a bit off-topic.

There's one more request from HowToGeek. Could you please provide the subscription to particular threads via email? I don't keep checking all the threads all the times. So when someone answers a question after quite a long delay (like the above reply by LH), I just won't know about it. Even this one I happened to notice since I saw it in the email sent to me by HTG. (RSS/ATOM feeds are not an option for me.) Thanks.

Alright. Thanks for your understanding. I'll wait. I'll keep checking biweekly or so until Mozilla fixes it. I've also reported in their own forum but they're not interested it seems.

Hey, LH seems to be spot on again! Seems like the first link is exactly what I need (by its description). I'll install it today, and will (hopefully) mark the problem as solved tomorrow. Wonder how you got it while I missed it during the search LOL!

Thanks again!

And if you want to get the images from the cache when you are offline. I think this may do it,
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/m.....iewer.html