My brain has been buzzing for the last few days, trying to solve a problem that had me utterly confused. Anyone trying to talk with me during this time may have been greeted with grunts of "leave-me-alone-i'm-thinking" annoyance - sorry about that.
Firefox was sending two identical HTTP requests to the server for every page on a website I was developing. The first response of which was seemingly ignored by Firefox and overwritten with the second. This was effectively doubling the server's load.
After searching for a solution I came across a few sites that had discovered an issue with emtpy "src" attributes in Firefox. My site had no external assets however, so this didn't apply (but a good thing to know for future).
Eventually, to my dismay, the issue in my case all boiled down to an extra semi-colon where there shouldn't have been one! I hate typos.
I had the following meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8;" />
Anyone spot the rogue semi-colon? It should have been:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
It was a stroke of luck to find this, so hopefully it will save a few others (who posess similar typo tendancies) a major headache!