204860 - Mozilla does not implement (correctly) implementd or recognize HTTP Expires-headers

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Networking: Cache, defect)

Description

[Sander Holthaus]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030507
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030507

For some reason, Mozilla does not honor HTTP-expire headers sent by the server.
Expire-date for HTML-pages is set to 5min instead of the 24 hours sent by my
server. SHTML-pages are even set to expire imidiately! The expire-date for
favicon.ico is even set to over 100 years!

Work correctly on other browsers, such as MSIE. Server is Apache 2.0.45.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Request a page whcih has a custom http-expires being sent along
2. Go to "View Page-Info"
3.

Actual Results:  
The wrong Expire-date is showing

Expected Results:  
It should use the server-sent Expire-date.

It seems that Mozilla has some sort of build-in Expire-seting mechanism, just
like Opera. This should be not on by default, since it can cause many problems.
Setting the expire-date for favicon's to over 100 years is a BAD idea.

Comment 1

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

favicons are always cached for various reasons, mainly because most servers
don't post expiry dates, and we'd be relooking them up on each page load.
(Although bug 120466 suggests that the opposite is happening).

Apart from that, expiry works for me. The page you give has a 403 error, so I
can't look. If you're using <meta> http expris, teh I dont' think that page info
shows that, although I;m not sure.

Comment 2

[Stefan [:stefanh]]

Bug 163806 might be related. See also bug 204684.

Comment 3

[Sander Holthaus]

> favicons are always cached for various reasons, mainly because most servers
> don't post expiry dates, and we'd be relooking them up on each page load.
> Although bug 120466 suggests that the opposite is happening).

But setting a expiry date 100 years from know is a bit overdone. 1 month or 1 
year should do it. Websites do change sometimes...

> The page you give has a 403 error, so I can't look.

That should not be the case :-( Which Browser are you using? You get anything 
at all?

Comment 4

[Stefan [:stefanh]]

Adding a "w" to the URL... :)

Comment 5

[wacheo]

I suppose it's a problem with the server setting. I try to get the headers for
http://www.orangexl.nl/index.html and http://www.orangexl.nl/favicon.ico. Both
of them have 24 hour expiry in the "Expires" header. And the "Expires" header
doesn't seem to match the "Cache-Control: max-age=" header.

$ curl -I http://www.orangexl.nl/index.html
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 08 May 2003 19:08:59 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.45
Cache-Control: max-age=86400
Expires: Fri, 09 May 2003 19:08:59 GMT
Last-Modified: Fri, 04 Apr 2003 15:17:47 GMT
ETag: "9d7-2d24-a6c87cc0"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 11556
Vary: User-Agent
Content-Style-Type: text/css
Content-Script-Type: text/javascript
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Language: nl

$ curl -I http://www.orangexl.nl/favicon.ico
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 08 May 2003 19:12:20 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.45
Cache-Control: max-age=5356800
Expires: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 19:12:20 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 25 Dec 2002 11:54:10 GMT
ETag: "9f6-47e-26765c80"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1150
Content-Style-Type: text/css
Content-Script-Type: text/javascript
Content-Type: image/x-icon
Content-Language: nl

Comment 6

[Sander Holthaus]

Those headers are correct. The Expire-header is showing 24 hours from the 
request-date, as is the max-age header (86400 = 86400 seconds = 24 hours). As I 
said, the headers that are sent are correct and have been confirmed working in 
other browsers!

Comment 7

[wacheo]

Oops, sorry, I misread the informations. :p

I tried some of the links again but could not reproduce the problem:
(I must be dreaming the last time... :) )

http://www.orangexl.nl/index.html
Expires (in Page Info): 05/09/2003 04:09:03 PM (EDT)
Expires Header: Fri, 09 May 2003 20:09:03 GMT

http://www.orangexl.nl/favicon.ico   
Expires: 07/09/2003 04:05:35 PM (EDT)
Expires Header: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 20:05:35 GMT

http://www.orangexl.nl/
Expires: 05/12/2003 02:15:25 AM (EDT) 
No Expires Header

http://www.orangexl.nl/orangexl/waardenenmissie.html
Expires: 05/09/2003 04:11:10 PM (EDT)
Expires Header: Fri, 09 May 2003 20:11:10 GMT

I am using linux build 2003050714 (1.4b).

Comment 8

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

2038 should be the limit for expiry dates, given how this works internally.

Anyway, WFM apart from favicon stuff which is covered by other bugs.

Comment 9

[Ken Johanson]

This seems broken - I am trying this right now on my 2004092716 build. Both
Expires and Last-Modified dont seem to be acknowledged, according to Page-Info
(CTRL + I).

Sample response at http://www.kensystem.com/mozilla/date-headers.jsp

returns:
HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: Keep-Alive
MIME-version: 1.0
Server: SAMBAR/JavaEngine
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 21:34:34 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Keep-Alive: timeout=180


Possibly related to bug#203271