How do I make html have priority over firefox's memory for select elements?

Question

Consider the following piece of code :

<select>
    <option value="0">foo</option>
    <option value="1" selected="selected">bar</option>
</select>

If I select the first option and reload the page, the first option stays selected and the select does not switch to the second option. How can I force firefox to give priority to the html?

Answer 1

Select the second option using Javascript on page load.

Answer 2

When you load your page the selected="selected" will say which option to highlight in the select so that should work... for the first time :D.

To reload the page you must click in the browser address bar and then hit enter or type CTRL+SHIFT+R.

If I remember correctly it has something to do with caching. Firefox will remember the values of the form elements and use those instead of doing a complete refresh which is useful if you've filled out half the form and don't want to be forced to start over again on a refresh.

However it creates other problems as you have seen. The following page describes some ways of handling this issue.

Answer 3

Good question. I think this can't be done using pure HTML.

You could try using JavaScript to reset the form. I don't know what it will reset to, but I guess it will do what you want:

 document.forms["formname"].reset();

needs to be triggered on the load event of course (or in ready() in jQuery).

Answer 4

I've had this problem and my solution was using PHP to give each name a random 5 digit key, it stops firefox remembering parts of forms. for example:

<input type="text" name="35472username"></input>
<input type="password" name="56784password"></input>

then when processing the form i would substr() the name.

It works well but there may be more efficient methods