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

I'm hardly a caching expert, but Mark Nottingham is. Here are his caching docs. He also has excellent links in the References section.

Based on my reading of those docs, it looks like max-age=0 could allow the cache to send a cached response to requests that came in at the "same time" where "same time" means close enough together they look simultaneous to the cache, but no-cache would not.

Answer 2

Old question now, but if anyone else comes across this through a search as I did, it appears that IE9 will be making use of this to configure the behaviour of resources when using the back and forward buttons. When max-age=0 is used, the browser will use the last version when viewing a resource on a back/forward press. If no-cache is used, the resource will be refetched.

Further details about IE9 caching can be seen on this msdn caching blog post.

Answer 3

The difference is that no-cache (no-store on Firefox) prevents any kind of caching. That can be useful to prevent pages with secure content being written to disk and for pages that should always be updated even if they are re-visited with the back button.

max-age=0 indicates that a cache entry is stale and requires re-validation, but does not prevent caching. Often browsers only validate resources once per browser session, so the content may not get updated until the site is visited in a new session.

Usually, browsers will not delete expired cache entries, unless they are reclaiming the space for newer content when the browser cache is full. Using no-store, no-cache allows a cache entry to be explicitly deleted.