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IIRC this is exactly what the reload button used to do. You had to hold down what I believe was the Control key while pressing the reload button to do a "force

IIRC this is exactly what the reload button used to do. You had to hold down what I believe was the Control key while pressing the reload button to do a "force refresh". Now it would seem it's the default behaviour. That, or maybe a normal refresh does the revalidation checks (which return 304), while a Control-refresh does a full download of all resources?

SwellJoe 10y ago
Browsers behave the same (though they've acquired additional nuance since the HTTP 1.0 and pre days) as they always have, generally speaking. IE had a cache control bug for many years that made it impossible to force a reload in some circumstances, but was fixed in IE 6. The change is on the server side, not the browser. Modern single page applications do all kinds of janky things, and a lot of them break caching, either explicitly (with cache-control headers) or accidentally (with uncacheable URLs). As far as I know, every major browser has standards compliant cache-control implementations, and all have some way to force a full reload. Source: I worked on cache-control browser compatibility in Squid many years ago. The browsers took a while, but did get it right eventually.
sslalready 10y ago
In at least recent versions of Firefox and Chrome, a reload includes a `Cache-Control:max-age=0` with the request. During a forced reload (e.g. Shift-Reload), both the legacy `Pragma:no-cache` (HTTP/1.0) and the more modern `Cache-Control:no-cache` (HTTP/1.1) headers are sent.