Ubuntu – Apache2 remove response headers

Probably the ProxyPass / directive you have in your config routes all requests to the Tomcat backend, bypassing all your mod_rewrite directives. You can try to remove the ProxyPass directive and use RewriteRule with the [P] flag after your other rewrites:

• mod_rewrite: P|proxy

For the expire headers the situation is worse — in another similar question a solution was not found.

Option +FollowSymLinks would be needed for using mod_rewrite in .htaccess files; in your case it is not required, because you can put everything in the Apache config. Moving rules from config to .htaccess is pointless and can only make things slower. However, there is an important difference between .htaccess and the Apache config — in .htaccess patterns in RewriteRule are matched against relative filesystem paths (which never start with /), while in the VirtualHost context these patterns are matched against the URL path after the hostname, which always starts with /. Therefore at least one of your rules is incorrect:

RewriteRule ^content/(js|css)/([a-z]+)-([0-9]+)\.(js|css)$ /content/$1/$2.$4

should be

RewriteRule ^/content/(js|css)/([a-z]+)-([0-9]+)\.(js|css)$ /content/$1/$2.$4

(note the additional slash in the beginning).

So I think I figured it out.

It appears that IE caches the AJAX GET data in such a way that it is hard (impossible?) to clear it out. Maybe I had the xml configured as text/xml at some point, but I don't think so. Basically, IE continued to use the cached results for that XML file over the actual server results. That also explains why the HTTP headers looked so odd (no server information for instance). Or it's possible that the cache is always producing text/html (I gave up further tests).

My solution: I added a '?avoidcache=' + a timestamp to the end of the URL in the GET request. Now IE gets the proper HTTP headers that I set on the server.

Wow do I hate Internet Explorer. How many development hours are wasted creating workarounds for it's horrible behavior?