HTTP resource caching / fetching

Question

I'm trying to optimise a page, and I'm seeing some strange behaviour. Each time I click on a link to the page, all resources are fetched from the server, responding with 200s. However, when I refresh the page (specifically, F5 in Firefox), all resources return a 304 and - of course - the page loads much faster as a result.

The main page returns a 200 in both cases. In the refresh case, If-Modified-Since headers are sent with the requests to the resources. However, in the 'clicking a link' case, they are not. What's the reason for that, and can I control it?

Answer 1

That sounds like a browser setting to me an, flicking through the options I can see in Firefox on my (Windows 7) netbook, I can't see anything that would allow you to control it.

So I think that's a no, I'm afraid.