How to prevent Chrome from refreshing page when viewing source?

From the bug report page, the workaround mentioned in comment 12 works: In the Developer Tools, enable Resource Tracking. (If it was off, enabling it will resubmit the request that generated the currently visible page, either POST or GET.) In the list of Resources, you can click on the main page to see the source code as it was returned by sever the for both POST and GET requests.

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I ran some tests using a simple php file that showed the request method used and a POSTed value, a proxy server log to see which requests Chrome was making, and the chrome://net-internals/view-cache/ prefix to see what Chrome was caching.

When you use the View Source command, Chrome shows the source of its cached version of the page, and it only caches pages requested via the GET method.

If you're looking at a page that you've previously requested using GET and POST, then only the GET version is cached. Using the View Source command won't re-request the page, but will show the cached GET version, not the currently visible POST version, if any.

If you're looking at a page that you've only requested using the POST method, then using the View Source command will cause Chrome to look in its cache, find nothing, request the page using GET, cache it, and show the source of that.

Good question - and somewhat disappointing to read all those "this is wrong" or "this won't work" comments. This behavior makes the "View page source" feature useless for development in many cases.

There's an extension called "Quick source viewer", which appears to actually show the source of the currently loaded page (I haven't tested it with POST requests though).