Having gotten tired of going back to a page that should still be in the browser's cache but then having to wait for it to reload (now with different data), I actually spent quite of bit of time studying browser cache control junk.

In the end, I determined that all of the various forms of cache control had almost no impact on convincing any of quite a few browsers that I played with that they don't have to reload. Many browsers would often not reload when I clicked a simple link and then clicked the "Back" button. But every browser would sometimes reload no matter what cache control headers were included. And whether or not to reload appeared to be to a large extent random.

And I observed several different browsers get in "moods" where they would start constantly (every time I got there by clicking "Back") reloading a particularly unfortunate page (such as RAT). Some of those moods I was able to shake the browser out of by telling it to delete all browsing history and all cached pages and then restarting the browser.

Once this "mood" was introduced when I installed a browser add-on. Removing the add-on and also doing the above rather drastic trick failed to revert the "mood". Eventually that instance of the mood just went away again at random even though I still had the add-on installed.

You'll likely have much better success at using cache control headers to convince a browser to always reload a page. I tried lots of combinations of cache control headers and none of them actually resulted in fewer reloads compared to having no cache control headers.

- tye        

In reply to Re: PM cache control changed? (browsers--) by tye
in thread PM cache control changed? by BrowserUk

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