What's the difference between Cache-Control: max-age=0 and no-cache?

Question

The header Cache-Control: max-age=0 implies that the content is considered stale (and must be re-fetched) immediately, which is in effect the same thing as

Answer 1

In my recent tests with IE8 and Firefox 3.5, it seems that both are RFC-compliant. However, they differ in their "friendliness" to the origin server. IE8 treats no-cache responses with the same semantics as max-age=0,must-revalidate. Firefox 3.5, however, seems to treat no-cache as equivalent to no-store, which sucks for performance and bandwidth usage.

Squid Cache, by default, seems to never store anything with a no-cache header, just like Firefox.

My advice would be to set public,max-age=0 for non-sensitive resources you want to have checked for freshness on every request, but still allow the performance and bandwidth benefits of caching. For per-user items with the same consideration, use private,max-age=0.

I would avoid the use of no-cache entirely, as it seems it has been bastardized by some browsers and popular caches to the functional equivalent of no-store.

Additionally, do not emulate Akamai and Limelight. While they essentially run massive caching arrays as their primary business, and should be experts, they actually have a vested interest in causing more data to be downloaded from their networks. Google might not be a good choice for emulation, either. They seem to use max-age=0 or no-cache randomly depending on the resource.