Inspecting Response Headers in the browser

I needed to inspect the headers being sent to various browsers today. Specifically we wanted to find out how Yahoo was able to deliver a "fresh" CAPTCHA image when you used the browser back button to return to the page with the CAPTCHA image on it.

We observed that this happened even with Javascript disabled, and so came to the conclusion that it must be something in the response headers.

In Firefox (v1.5+) there is a really useful extension that I have mentioned before (the Web Developer Toolbar extension) which can show the headers using Tools -> Web Developer -> Information -> View Response Headers.

When using Internet Explorer a solution is to use the IE HTTP Headers plugin (for IE v5.0+) which is available at http://www.blunck.se

For those interested, the solution to the problem was to add the following headers to the response:

static void doNotCacheResponse(HttpServletResponse response) {
response.setHeader('Pragma', 'no-cache')
response.setHeader('Cache-Control', 'no-cache,no-store')
response.setHeader('Expires', '-1')
}

We've tested that this works to force a re-request using Firefox 2, Firefox 3, IE6, IE7, Chrome, Safari 3 and Opera 9 - which is nice!