Question

I have .htaccess set up to expire js and css files after 7 days. ETag is turned off, and gzip / Deflate is turned on.

In my source HTML there are 25 different calls to load JS files. Not my design. Here is an example of one of those calls:

<script type="text/javascript" src="content/vendors/jquery/rater/jquery.rater-custom.js"></script>

The response header from inspection via Firebug:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date:             Sun, 20 Jan 2013 23:35:42 GMT
Server:           Apache
Last-Modified:    Sun, 20 Jan 2013 22:49:10 GMT
Accept-Ranges:    bytes
Cache-Control:    max-age=604800
Expires:          Sun, 27 Jan 2013 23:35:42 GMT
Vary:             Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length:   648
Keep-Alive:       timeout=1, max=95
Connection:       Keep-Alive
Content-Type:     application/x-javascript

There are also a ton of CSS references. The page is extremely slow and I am trying to get caching to work, to speed it up. On IE 9 and Chrome after the first load, this page will render almost instantly…I can tell all these files are being pulled from the cache in those browsers.

On FireFox I cannot get the browser to use the cached copies. Any idea what I am missing or what could be going on that is forcing FireFox to request fresh copies of these files every single time the page is reloaded?

Answer 1

Have you checked your Firefox configuration? Sometimes people deactivate caching for development reasons, for example via the Developers Toolbar…