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Firefox is ignoring cache-control directives

AnonymousUser
AnonymousUser
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Firefox is not respecting cache-control directives specified in response headers. Below is an example response generated by my application:

Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.4; JBoss-4.2.3.GA (build: SVNTag=JBoss_4_2_3_GA date=200807181417)/JBossWeb-2.0 Pragma: no-cache Cache-Control: no-cache Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT Content-Type: text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1 Transfer-Encoding: chunked Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:13:53 GMT

Despite the cache-control: no-cache, and the fact that the page has already expired, when the user navigates away, and then hits the back button, the page is re-displayed from cache. This causes subsequent navigation attempts to fail because the transaction identifiers are stale and have already been used.

This happened

Every time Firefox opened

Firefox is not respecting cache-control directives specified in response headers. Below is an example response generated by my application: Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.4; JBoss-4.2.3.GA (build: SVNTag=JBoss_4_2_3_GA date=200807181417)/JBossWeb-2.0 Pragma: no-cache Cache-Control: no-cache Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT Content-Type: text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1 Transfer-Encoding: chunked Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:13:53 GMT Despite the cache-control: no-cache, and the fact that the page has already expired, when the user navigates away, and then hits the back button, the page is re-displayed from cache. This causes subsequent navigation attempts to fail because the transaction identifiers are stale and have already been used. == This happened == Every time Firefox opened

All Replies (2)

S11001001
S11001001
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Firefox's cache mechanism doesn't have the same rules as an ordinary cache; in fact RFC 2616 suggests that it would be better to diverge in this sense. From RFC 2616 §13.13:

History mechanisms and caches are different. In particular history mechanisms SHOULD NOT try to show a semantically transparent view of the current state of a resource. Rather, a history mechanism is meant to show exactly what the user saw at the time when the resource was retrieved.

Jamie Kitson
Jamie Kitson
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I had a similar problem to you and eventually found the following: 

Cache-control: no-cache
Cache-control: no-store
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: 0

http://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/http/http-caching-faq.html

Modified by Jamie Kitson