Preventing iframe caching in browser

How do you prevent Firefox and Safari from caching iframe content?

I have a simple webpage with an iframe to a page on a different site. Both the outer page and the inner page have HTTP response headers to prevent caching. When I click the "back" button in the browser, the outer page works properly, but no matter what, the browser always retrieves a cache of the iframed page. IE works just fine, but Firefox and Safari are giving me trouble.

My webpage looks something like this:

<html>
  <head><!-- stuff --></head>
<body>
  <!-- stuff -->
  <iframe src="webpage2.html?var=xxx" />
  <!-- stuff -->
</body>
</html>

The var variable always changes. Although the URL of the iframe has changed (and thus, the browser should be making a new request to that page), the browser just fetches the cached content.

I've examined the HTTP requests and responses going back and forth, and I noticed that even if the outer page contains <iframe src="webpage2.html?var=222" />, the browser will still fetch webpage2.html?var=111.

Here's what I've tried so far:

Changing iframe URL with random var value
Adding Expires, Cache-Control, and Pragma headers to outer webpage
Adding Expires, Cache-Control, and Pragma headers to inner webpage

I'm unable to do any JavaScript tricks because I'm blocked by the same-origin policy.

I'm running out of ideas. Does anyone know how to stop the browser from caching the iframed content?

Update

I installed Fiddler2 as Daniel suggested to perform another test, and unfortunately, I am still getting the same results.

This is the test I performed:

Outer page generates random number using Math.random() in JSP.
Outer page displays a random number on the webpage.
Outer page calls iframe, passing in a random number.
Inner page displays a random number.

With this test, I'm able to see exactly which pages are updating, and which pages are cached.

Visual Test

For a quick test, I load the page, navigate to another page, and then press "back." Here are the results:

Original Page:

Outer Page: 0.21300034290246206
Inner Page: 0.21300034290246206

Leaving page, then hitting back:

Outer page: 0.4470929019483644
Inner page: 0.21300034290246206

This shows that the inner page is being cached, even though the outer page is calling it with a different GET parameter in the URL. For some reason, the browser is ignoring the fact that the iframe is requesting a new URL; it simply loads the old one.

Fiddler Test

Sure enough, Fiddler confirms the same thing.

(I load the page.)

Outer page is called. HTML:

0.21300034290246206
<iframe src="http://ipv4.fiddler:1416/page1.aspx?var=0.21300034290246206" />

http://ipv4.fiddler:1416/page1.aspx?var=0.21300034290246206 is called.

(I navigate away from the page and then hit back.)

Outer page is called. HTML:

0.4470929019483644
<iframe src="http://ipv4.fiddler:1416/page1.aspx?var=0.4470929019483644" />

http://ipv4.fiddler:1416/page1.aspx?var=0.21300034290246206 is called.

Well, from this test, it looks as though the web browser isn't caching the page, but it's caching the URL of the iframe and then making a new request on that cached URL. However, I'm still stumped as to how to solve this issue.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to stop the web browser from caching iframe URLs?

Solution 1:

This is a bug in Firefox:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=356558

Try this workaround:

<iframe src="webpage2.html?var=xxx" id="theframe"></iframe>

<script>
var _theframe = document.getElementById("theframe");
_theframe.contentWindow.location.href = _theframe.src;
</script>

Solution 2:

I have been able to work around this bug by setting a unique name attribute on the iframe - for whatever reason, this seems to bust the cache. You can use whatever dynamic data you have as the name attribute - or simply the current ms or ns time in whatever templating language you're using. This is a nicer solution than those above because it does not directly require JS.

In my particular case, the iframe is being built via JS (but you could do the same via PHP, Ruby, whatever), so I simply use Date.now():

return '<iframe src="' + src + '" name="' + Date.now() + '" />';

This fixes the bug in my testing; probably because the window.name in the inner window changes.

Solution 3:

As you said, the issue here is not iframe content caching, but iframe url caching.

As of September 2018, it seems the issue still occurs in Chrome but not in Firefox.

I've tried many things (adding a changing GET parameter, clearing the iframe url in onbeforeunload, detecting a "reload from cache" using a cookie, setting up various response headers) and here are the only two solutions that worked from me:

1- Easy way: create your iframe dynamically from javascript

For example:

const iframe = document.createElement('iframe')
iframe.id = ...
...
iframe.src = myIFrameUrl 
document.body.appendChild(iframe)

2- Convoluted way

Server-side, as explained here, disable content caching for the content you serve for the iframe OR for the parent page (either will do).

AND

Set the iframe url from javascript with an additional changing search param, like this:

const url = myIFrameUrl + '?timestamp=' + new Date().getTime()
document.getElementById('my-iframe-id').src = url

(simplified version, beware of other search params)

Solution 4:

After trying everything else (except using a proxy for the iframe content), I found a way to prevent iframe content caching, from the same domain:

Use .htaccess and a rewrite rule and change the iframe src attribute.

RewriteRule test/([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+).html$ /test/index.php?idEntity=$1&token=$2 [QSA]

The way I use this is that the iframe's URL end up looking this way: example.com/test/54/e3116491e90e05700880bf8b269a8cc7.html

Where [token] is a randomly generated value. This URL prevents iframe caching since the token is never the same, and the iframe thinks it's a totally different webpage since a single refresh loads a totally different URL :

example.com/test/54/e3116491e90e05700880bf8b269a8cc7.html
example.com/test/54/d2cc21be7cdcb5a1f989272706de1913.html

both lead to the same page.

You can access your hidden url parameters with $_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"]