I work with a web platform where images can be optionally served from cloud storage, S3 in our case. This redirects image requests to a URL containing a dynamic signature… (read more)
I work with a web platform where images can be optionally served from cloud storage, S3 in our case. This redirects image requests to a URL containing a dynamic signature which changes per request. For example, to load an image, the browser might do:
-> GET https://www.example.com/file.php/image01.jpg
<- HTTP/2 303 See Other
expires: Thu, 03 Apr 2025 11:23:44 GMT
cache-control: public, max-age=14400
location: https://[site].amazonaws.com/...filename%3D%22image01.jpg%22&X-Amz-Signature=...123
and the browser follows the redirect to get the image:
-> GET https://[site].amazonaws.com/...filename%3D%22image01.jpg%22&X-Amz-Signature=...123
<- 200 OK
But if I refresh the page the signature is now different:
-> GET https://www.example.com/file.php/image01.jpg
<- HTTP/2 303 See Other
expires: Thu, 03 Apr 2025 11:24:03 GMT
cache-control: public, max-age=14400
location: https://[site].amazonaws.com/...filename%3D%22image01.jpg%22&X-Amz-Signature=...abc
The browser doesn't have this URL cached so it again fetches the image:
-> GET https://[site].amazonaws.com/...filename%3D%22image01.jpg%22&X-Amz-Signature=...abc
<- 200 OK
In Firefox that is. In Chrome there's the same following of the redirect when the page is first loaded, but when the page is refreshed the redirect has been cached:
-> GET https://www.example.com/file.php/image01.jpg
<- HTTP/2 303 See Other (from disk cache)
location: https://[site].amazonaws.com/...filename%3D%22image01.jpg%22&X-Amz-Signature=...123
Since the redirect is now to the same URL the image is fetched from the browser cache. Obviously subsequent page loads are faster on Chrome, much faster on image-heavy pages (for example, 6 seconds on Chrome, 1+ minutes on Firefox).
Is there anything I can do to improve this?
Tested with Firefox 136.0.2 and Chrome 134.0.6998.35.
This looks a little bit like [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1889840 #1889840
will never use an entry in the image cache when loading an image top level that has a redirect] but I think that's referring to images with static URLs.
