Browsers behave the same (though they&#x27;ve acquired additional nuance since the HTTP 1.0 and pre days) as they always have, generally speaking. IE had a cache control bug for many years that made it impossible to force a reload in some circumstances, but was fixed in IE 6.<p>The change is on the server side, not the browser. Modern single page applications do all kinds of janky things, and a lot of them break caching, either explicitly (with cache-control headers) or accidentally (with uncacheable URLs).<p>As far as I know, every major browser has standards compliant cache-control implementations, and all have some way to force a full reload.<p>Source: I worked on cache-control browser compatibility in Squid many years ago. The browsers took a while, but did get it right eventually.