SSL caching on Firefox 3

Since upgrading to Ubuntu Hardy, I've been enjoying using Firefox 3. The reduced memory usage has made a lot of other things nicer to use (I don't feel like I need to buy more memory now). One thing that is nice to see fixed is caching of SSL content.

In previous versions of Firefox, SSL content was never cached to disk with the default settings. While you certainly don't want all SSL content to be written to disk, a lot of it can be cached without problem. For example, it is important that the CSS and JavaScript for a page be served via SSL to avoid man in the middle attacks (injecting arbitrary active content into a secure page is bad), but there isn't much harm in caching them to disk: if the attacker can modify the disk cache then SSL probably doesn't matter much.

Now it was possible to turn on disk caching in Firefox 2 through the browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl hidden option, but it had a serious drawback: the security information for resources was not saved in the disk cache so you'd get a broken padlock if resources were loaded from the cache.

Firefox 3 fixes up the disk cache to record the security information though, so turning on disk_cache_ssl setting no longer results in a broken padlock. But what about all the people using Firefox with its default settings (or those who do not want all SSL content cached to disk)? For these users, the web server can still cause some content to be cached.

By sending the "Cache-Control: public" response header, the server can say that a resource can be stored in the disk cache. Firefox 3 will respect this irrespective of the disk_cache_ssl setting. This should bring Firefox back into parity with Internet Explorer with respect to network performance on SSL web sites.