Causing a page reload on the back button in IE January 4

Filed under Technology by scotty | 0 comments

So, I’ve spent the better part of today trying to figure out how to get IE to always reload a particular page, even if the user gets there via the back button. There is some discrepancy between various browser vendors over seemingly conflicting portions of the HTTP 1.1 spec, namely 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.

and 14.9.2 about the no-store:

If sent in a response, a cache MUST NOT store any part of either this response or the request that elicited it. This directive applies to both non-shared and shared caches.

(the above pulled from the very helpful posting by Chris Shiflett ).

The requisite magic is apparently the following apace config:

Header set Cache-Control no-store
KeepAlive On
KeepAliveTimeout 15

I have NO idea why you have to have keepalive turned on for this to work. But you do. Man, developing for IE is a pain.