POST request through AJAX results in error 404 in Firefox only

Question

In my Flask-app I try to implement POST request through AJAX call when user clicks on the link. It works like a charm in Chromium. I have no problems when requesting my view function through httpie either:

$ http --json POST http://127.0.0.1:5000/ctrl/remove-category id=1 csrf=1

(venv) $ : http --json POST http://127.0.0.1:5000/ctrl/remove-category id=5 csrf=1
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-Length: 78
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2016 09:05:20 GMT
Server: Werkzeug/0.11.8 Python/3.5.1

{
    "message": "Category 'test 5' has been removed",
    "status": "success"
}

But in Firefox something strange happens. I tested it under two FF profiles. Both of them give me 404 error. When clicking the link under my first FF profile I get 404 and nothing happens, i.e. I don't even see POST request to Werkzeug server, only GET request.

Under the second FF profile I still get an error in Firebug console:

POST http://127.0.0.1:5000/ctrl/remove-category 31ms        jquery.min.js (line 6)
Error code: 404                                             categories (line 455)

So POST request is sent and I see it in my Werkzeug logs:

127.0.0.1 - - [09/Jul/2016 11:29:11] "POST /ctrl/remove-category HTTP/1.1" 200 -
127.0.0.1 - - [09/Jul/2016 11:29:12] "GET /ctrl/categories HTTP/1.1" 200 -

Nonetheless, I still don't get other things done in my AJAX `.success' call (like saving things to localStorage, etc.)

Here is my jQuery script:

<script>
 $('.remove').click( function() {
     var data = {};
     data['csrf'] = $('#csrf-removal').val()
     data['id'] = $(this).data('id-removal');

     $.ajaxSetup({
     beforeSend: function(xhr, settings) {
             if (!/^(GET|HEAD|OPTIONS|TRACE)$/i.test(settings.type) && !this.crossDomain) {
         xhr.setRequestHeader("X-CSRFToken", data['csrf'])
             }
     }
     });

     var remove = confirm('Are you sure?');
     if (remove == true) {
     $.ajax({
             url: "{{ url_for('ctrl.remove_category', _external=True) }}",
             type: 'post',
             dataType: 'json',
             contentType: 'application/json;charset=UTF-8',
             data: JSON.stringify(data, null, '\t'),
         success: function(response) {
         // message to user
         var flash = "<div class='alert alert-" + response['status'] + "'>" +
                     "<button type='button' class='close' data-dismiss='alert'>&times;</button>" +
                     response['message'] + "</div>";
         // save message to localStorage
         window.onbeforeunload = function() {
             localStorage.setItem('message', flash);
         }
         // reload the page
         location.reload();
         // jump to the top of the page
         $('html,body').scrollTop(0);
             },
             error: function(jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown) {
         console.log('Error code: ' + jqXHR.status);
             }
     });
     }
 });
</script>

This is my view function:

@csrf.exempt # for httpie testing
@ctrl.route('/remove-category', methods=['POST'])
#@permission_required(Permission.ADMINISTER) # httpie testing
def remove_category():
    try:
        id = request.json['id']
        csrf = request.json['csrf']
    except KeyError:
        return jsonify({
            'status': 'error',
            'message': 'Function takes two parameters: '
                       'id of the entry to be removed; csrf token',
        })

    category = Category.query.get_or_404(id)
    if category.posts.count():
        status = 'warning'
        message = "Category '{0}' is not empty and cannot be removed".\
                  format(category.title)
    else:
        status = 'success'
        message = "Category '{0}' has been removed".\
                  format(category.title)
        db.session.delete(category)
    return jsonify({
        'status': status,
        'message': message,
    })

I'm using jQuery 2.0.3, Flask 0.10.1, Flask-WTF 0.9.4 and Firefox 47.0. I'm very new to javascript and cross-browser things related to js, so any help is appreciated.

P.S. I'm aware of this topic, but using accepts with 'application/json' in ajax call didn't help.

UPDATE: Using DevTools in Chromium and Firebug in Firefox, I copied POST requests from both browsers as cURL commands and compared their results:

1. Chromium (see gist) works as expected, server gets a request and sends response.

2. Firefox (see gist) doesn't work. Request sent, but response is never received. cURL' is hanging untill I terminate it with^C'. Upon termination I see logs that Werkzeug webserver returns error 400:

   127.0.0.1 - - [09/Jul/2016 14:29:01] "POST /ctrl/remove-category HTTP/1.1" 400

Answer 1

Okay, I've found the problem.

After reading this bug report, I upgraded to jQuery 2.1.1. That resulted in getting error code 0 instead of 404. Status code 0 could mean that my script reloads the page before it gets AJAX response (see this SO topic).

So I added setTimeout for 1 sec delay before reloading the page:

setTimeout(function() { // wait 1 sec
    location.reload();  // reload page
    $('html,body').scrollTop(0); // jump on top
}, 1000); 

And that did the trick.

P.S. setTimeout is a temporary workaround to see if it solves the problem. The right way to do things like that is using promises (see jQuery.when/done)