Disabling browser caching for all browsers from ASP.NET

This is what we use in ASP.NET:

// Stop Caching in IE
Response.Cache.SetCacheability(System.Web.HttpCacheability.NoCache);

// Stop Caching in Firefox
Response.Cache.SetNoStore();

It stops caching in Firefox and IE, but we haven't tried other browsers. The following response headers are added by these statements:

Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store
Pragma: no-cache

For what it's worth, I just had to handle this in my ASP.NET MVC 3 application. Here is the code block I used in the Global.asax file to handle this for all requests.

    protected void Application_BeginRequest()
    {
        //NOTE: Stopping IE from being a caching whore
        HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetAllowResponseInBrowserHistory(false);
        HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);
        HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetNoStore();
        Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.Now);
        Response.Cache.SetValidUntilExpires(true);
    }

I've tried various combinations and had them fail in FireFox. It has been a while so the answer above may work fine or I may have missed something.

What has always worked for me is to add the following to the head of each page, or the template (Master Page in .net).

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
    window.onbeforeunload = function () {   
        // This function does nothing.  It won't spawn a confirmation dialog   
        // But it will ensure that the page is not cached by the browser.
    }  
</script>

This has disabled all caching in all browsers for me without fail.

There are two approaches that I know of. The first is to tell the browser not to cache the page. Setting the Response to no cache takes care of that, however as you suspect the browser will often ignore this directive. The other approach is to set the date time of your response to a point in the future. I believe all browsers will correct this to the current time when they add the page to the cache, but it will show the page as newer when the comparison is made. I believe there may be some cases where a comparison is not made. I am not sure of the details and they change with each new browser release. Final note I have had better luck with pages that "refresh" themselves (another response directive). The refresh seems less likely to come from the cache.

Hope that helps.

I'm going to test adding the no-store tag to our site to see if this makes a difference to browser caching (Chrome has sometimes been caching the pages). I also found this article very useful on documentation on how and why caching works and will look at ETag's next if the no-store is not reliable:

http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_ETag

See also How to prevent google chrome from caching my inputs, esp hidden ones when user click back? without which Chrome might reload but preserve the previous content of <input> elements -- in other words, use autocomplete="off".