JD said:
Thanks, Sandi. I remain curious as to the circumstances under which it would
be appropriate for anyone to choose the "Never" option.
Use of "Never" would be appropriate when the sites you visit always
have constant auxiliary content such as graphics and scripts which
are cached. E.g. then there would not be any unnecessary checking
done by IE; it would just used the cached version. I suppose that this
would work best when the actual HTML was not cached; otherwise since
no checking would be done for it either you would just be opening the
cached version without ever knowing if anything on the site had changed,
unless you did an F5 Refresh, which then would defeat the point of using
"Never", since F5 does issue checks for the page and all of its components.
"Never" could also be used as part of a circumvention in dealing with
a misbehaving intermediate cache. E.g. if you detected that there is an
intermediate cache which is feeding stale content and not notifying the
real host server of your requests you could try to get it to force your requests
through it by using "Never" with Ctrl-F5 if necessary. Every Visit
or F5 in that scenario would just cause the misbehaving cache to
respond incorrectly that the versions that you had in your cache were
current, so "Never" then would avoid that useless overhead.
Use FiddlerTool to watch the effect of cache-checking
on your requests to gain more general insight on the effects
of those options and related manual procedures such as
re-rendering, F5 Refresh, and Ctrl-F5 Refresh.
HTH
Robert Aldwinckle
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