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What happens if you don't set the cache-control header? Does HTTP specify a default behaviour that clients should follow or is it up to the clients to decide?

In Chrome, I have seen some Javascript requests that have no cache-control headers showing up as 200 (from disk cache). Is Chrome optimizing this?

In IE, I have seen it show up as a 304 (not modified).

How do I understand this better?

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    "no cache headers" meaning no Cache-Control header, or really no cache headers? Cache-control is not the only header that affects caching. Most web servers will send Last Modified headers for static assets like Javascript files. Dec 8, 2017 at 13:29

1 Answer 1

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If there is no Cache-Control header and no Expires header, but there is a Last-Modified header (which most web servers send by default for static assets), most browsers will use heuristic freshness to determine how long to cache that asset for.

The typical calculation for this (which is the one suggested by RFC 7234) is:

(current time - last modified time) / 10

So, for example, if the last modified time for an image states it was last changed 60 days ago, a browser might decide it could reasonably use the locally cached version of that image for 6 days before checking for a new version.

Note that in most cases, if you hit refresh, you are telling the browser to fetch a fresh version, so in that situation this logic wouldn't apply.

Freshness as determined by actual browsers:

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    And if there is no Last-Modified header?
    – bertonc96
    Apr 6, 2020 at 14:42
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    This is the answer I've been looking for. I am curious, however, what various browsers have as default.
    – aross
    Nov 18, 2020 at 12:27
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    @bertonc96 It seems to be 0 in that case. See for example this.
    – aross
    Nov 18, 2020 at 16:35

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