: What happens if you don't set cache-control header? What happens if you don't set the cache-control header? Does HTTP specify a default behaviour that clients should follow or is it up to the

@Cooney921

If there is no Cache-Control header and no Expires header, but there is a Last-Modified header (which most web servers send by default for static assets), most browsers will use heuristic freshness to determine how long to cache that asset for.

The typical calculation for this (which is the one suggested by RFC 7234) is:

(current time - last modified time) / 10


So, for example, if the last modified time for an image states it was last changed 60 days ago, a browser might decide it could reasonably use the locally cached version of that image for 6 days before checking for a new version.

Note that in most cases, if you hit refresh, you are telling the browser to fetch a fresh version, so in that situation this logic wouldn't apply.

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