553283 - page will not be refreshed if expires header is in the past

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, defect)

Description

[john]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

If webserver delivers "expires" and "Cache-Control: max-age" http headers which is in the past, then firefox always will take the page from it's internal cache. No roundtrip to the server (even no "if-modified-since") will be performed.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. add mod_expires on apache
2. configure mod_expires: 'ExpiresDefault "modification plus 5  minutes"
3. create a "index.html" and "test.html" on apache web server v2.2; index.html contains a link to test.html
4. wait >5 minutes
5. in firefox call http://server/index.html then click on "test.html" ==> expires-header will be in he past
6. edit test.html
7. press "back"-button in firefox, click on "test.html" link ==> test.html always will be fetched from cache, changes on test.html will no be shown




IE beheves correctly ;-)

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Odd.  The code that handles this sets the expiration time to "right now" if Expires is in the past.  See http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/netwerk/protocol/http/src/nsHttpResponseHead.cpp#299

Can you point me to a url that shows the problem for you?  Are any of your cache preferences set to non-default values?

Comment 2

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to comment #0)
> Steps to Reproduce:
> 1. add mod_expires on apache
> 2. configure mod_expires: 'ExpiresDefault "modification plus 5  minutes"
> 3. create a "index.html" and "test.html" on apache web server v2.2; index.html
> contains a link to test.html
> 4. wait >5 minutes

ExpiresDefault can be superceeded by "ExpiresByType text/html ..." etc.
> http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/en/mod/mod_expires.html
> Apache Module mod_expires
john, did you check such settings other than ExpiresDefault?

Firefox 3 has capability to see HTTP headers held in cache.
  1. about:cache, Disk cache device, List Cache Entries
  2. Find entry of next.
       Key: http://.../test.html
  3. Click linkified "http://.../test.html" at the lising.
What is set in expires: field? What HTTP heders are displayed in response-head: field?

What value is set in next? (about:config, "frequency" in filter filed)
> browser.cache.check_doc_frequency
Please read next page for the setting.
> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.check_doc_frequency

Comment 3

[john]

We first used "ExpiresDefault", after we saw the stange behavior of firefox we tried "ExpiresByType" which doesn't change the behavior.

We also tried to divide the expires settings: at "hot times" html pages will be refreshed every 5 minutes, so we tried "ExpiresByType" for html pages "modification plus 5  minutes" and all others (css, js, ...) "ExpiresDefault" plus 1 month.

I inspected the http headers with "live http headers" addon. All "expires" and "cache" headers are correctly set by apache! As I mentionted above - IE did it correctly! So I suppose that apache is wrong or our settings (in apache) are wrong.

in our browsers
  browser.cache.check_doc_frequency=3
which is the default setting. We also tried with a freshly installed firefox 3.6 (all settings are at default values).

Have you tried my "Steps to Reproduce"?

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

john, I tried your steps to reproduce locally (not using Apache, since I don't have that available right this second but using a different web server), and things seem to work fine.

If it's at all possible for you to set up a public test server that shows the problem, that would be great.  Otherwise I'll keep looking for a way to reproduce...