This is an artifact of HTTP/1.0, as many implementations did not support the no-cache directive. max-stale. The max-stale directive is used by a client to indicate that they will accept stale HTTP responses up to a certain number of seconds. This differs from max-age, as max-stale begins once the max-age expires. Cache-Control: max-stale=, I found that Chrome responds better to Cache-Control: no-cache (100% conditional requests afterwards). "no-store" sometimes loaded from cache without even attempting a conditional request. Firefox responds better to "no-store" but still sometimes loads from cache if you reload immediately afterwords. What a mess! –, Under certain circumstances, IE6 will still cache files even when Cache-Control: no-cache is in the response headers.. The W3C states of no-cache:. If the no-cache directive does not specify a field-name, then a cache MUST NOT use the response to satisfy a subsequent request without successful revalidation with the origin server., The nocache tool tries to minimize the effect an application has on the Linux file system cache. This is done by intercepting the open and close system calls and calling posix_fadvise with the POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED parameter. Because the library remembers which pages (ie., 4K-blocks of the file) were already in file system cache when the file was opened, these will not be marked as "don't need , From Microsoft For purposes of backward compatibility with HTTP 1.0 servers, Internet Explorer supports a special usage of the HTTP Pragma: no-cache header. If the client communicates with the server over a secure connection (https://) and the server returns a Pragma: no-cache header with the response, Internet Explorer does not cache the response., By adding Cache-Control: no-cache to the response along with Last-Modified and ETag — as shown below — the client will receive a 200 OK response if the requested resource has been updated, or will otherwise receive a 304 Not Modified response if the requested resource has not been updated. http. HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/html .