I’ve encountered a strange bug in Chrome 19. I implemented a full-AJAX website (every non-external link is opened via AJAX request) with pushState support. I transmit the HTML snippets in AJAX via JSON format.
When I leave my site via an external link and then go back, Chrome renders cached data for that URL – the problem is, he caches the JSON content and shows that, instead of full web-page.
This is reproducible by these steps (UPDATE: I removed AJAX functionality on my website since then, so this bug does no longer appear):
- Open http://beta.mirtes.cz/
- Click on the second date link (16. 6. 2012 next to “It all began with a strange e-mail”). This page (you are now at http://beta.mirtes.cz/it-all-began-with-a-strange-e-mail) is loaded via AJAX.
- Click on “It all began with a strange e-mail”. You are redirected to an external website.
- Click “Back” in Chrome after the page is completely loaded.
I try to send all AJAX responses with Cache-Control: no-cache, but with no effect.
Firefox 12 works OK.
I came with a workaround – I perform AJAX request with additional dummy GET parameter – ?ajax=1. This way the browser can recognize the difference between usual HTML content and JSON. It doesn’t have any impact on the user, the parameter is visible only in Firebug.