I do a lot of web development locally on my computer and I am always switching between local and remote servers using entries in the hosts file.  Because of this, it is hard to know if I’m actually looking at the correct version of my site.  Opera and Firefox both cache DNS to various degrees which makes it difficult to know if that change to the hosts file really did take effect.  I know you can disable the cache in Firefox — and probably Opera too — but I think this method is still useful.
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