[Moin-user] Multiple requests from Firefox

[Greg Ward]

I have just noticed some rather strange behaviour when using Firefox to
access a MoinMoin wiki: Firefox sends the GET request 2, 3, or even 4
times.  (I'm trying various versions of Firefox and various versions of
MoinMoin, so do not have entirely consistent results.)

For example, I have MoinMoin 1.7.1 running on my workstation with a test
copy of our production wiki.  (I'm testing the upgrade from 1.5.8 to
1.7.1.)  Everything is going through Apache and moin.cgi to keep it
simple.  The only change to my Apache config:

  Alias /wiki/ "/scratch/mywiki/htdocs/"
  ScriptAlias /mywiki "/scratch/mywiki/cgi-bin/moin.cgi"

If I load http://hostname/mywiki/FrontPage in Firefox (e.g. enter the URL
in the address bar), then Apache's access_log records

[11:04:26 -0400] "GET /icons/logo.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 284 
[11:04:26 -0400] "GET /mywiki/FrontPage HTTP/1.1" 200 25171 
[11:04:26 -0400] "GET /mywiki/FrontPage HTTP/1.1" 200 25171 
[11:04:27 -0400] "GET /mywiki/FrontPage HTTP/1.1" 200 25171 
[11:04:28 -0400] "GET /mywiki/FrontPage HTTP/1.1" 200 25171 

(That's trimmed for readability: yes, it logs the exact same User-Agent
for every request, and no, nobody else is hitting the web server on my
workstation as I do this.)

Just to see if my version of Firefox is completely broken, I hit some
static pages and other CGI scripts also on my workstation, and it only
requests them once each.  I also upgraded from Firefox 2.0.0.11 to
2.0.0.16, and it behaves the same.  (Alas, 3.0 did not work for me: need
to upgrade my OS, as I'm running a very out-of-date Fedora.)

And, oh yeah, Opera acts correctly.

Anyways, this sure feels to me like a Firefox problem that is in some
way being tickled by MoinMoin.  Was wondering if anyone else has seen
similar behaviour.

Thanks --

        Greg