Why does firefox round-trip to the server to determine whether my files are modifed?

Question

I have some static content on my web site that I have set up caching for (using Asp.NET MVC). According to Firebug, the first time I open the page, Firefox sends this request:

GET /CoreContent/Core.css?asm=0.7.3614.34951
Host: 127.0.0.1:3916
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept: text/css,*/*;q=0.1
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://127.0.0.1:3916/Edit/1/101
Cookie: .ASPXAUTH=52312E5A802C1A079E2BA29AA2BFBC5A38058977B84452D62ED52855D4164659B4307661EC73A307BFFB2ED3871C67CB3A9AAFDB3A75A99AC0A21C63A6AADE9A11A7138C672E75125D9FF3EFFBD9BF62
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache

Which my server replies to with this:

Server: ASP.NET Development Server/9.0.0.0
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:44:41 GMT
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
X-AspNetMvc-Version: 1.0
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31535671
Expires: Tue, 23 Nov 2010 18:39:12 GMT
Last-Modified: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:39:12 GMT
Vary: *
Content-Type: text/css
Content-Length: 15006
Connection: Close

So far, so good. However, if I refresh Firefox (not a cache-clearing refresh, just a normal one), during that refresh cycle Firefox will once again go to the server with this request:

GET /CoreContent/Core.css?asm=0.7.3614.34951
Host: 127.0.0.1:3916
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept: text/css,*/*;q=0.1
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://127.0.0.1:3916/Edit/1/101
Cookie: .ASPXAUTH=52312E5A802C1A079E2BA29AA2BFBC5A38058977B84452D62ED52855D4164659B4307661EC73A307BFFB2ED3871C67CB3A9AAFDB3A75A99AC0A21C63A6AADE9A11A7138C672E75125D9FF3EFFBD9BF62
If-Modified-Since: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:39:20 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=0

to which my server responds 304 Not Modified.

Why does Firefox issue this second request? In the first response, I said that the cache does not expire for a year (I intend to use query parameters whenever things change). Do I have to add another response header to prevent this extra roundtrip?

Edit: It does not matter whether I press refresh, or whether I go to the page again (or a different URL, which references the same external files). Firefox does the same again. Also, I don't claim this to be a bug in FF, I just wonder if there is another header I can set which means "This document will never change, don't bother me again".

Answer 1

This post explains the issue thoroughly:

http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/469125.aspx

Answer 2

This behavior seems to be "by design" for all modern browsers. In IE you can investigate the same situation. Hitting F5 always causes browser to check whether content was modified. During cache-clearing request browser do not pass Last-Modified header and server must return HTTP 200 (not HTTP 304), so 304 in your situation is not so bad.

Answer 3

Apparently, the issue was due to a Vary: * header being added to the response. To remove this in Asp.Net, add this to web.config inside the <system.web> section:

<caching>
    <outputCache omitVaryStar="true"/>
</caching>

To me it seems this switch is "yes, I want a working behaviour rather than a non-working one", but once you find it, flipping it is trivial.