I had to debug a weirdo IE download problem today. Clicking on a pdf,
word or powerpoint link wouldn’t do a thing. Right-clicking and saving
the file gave a weird error message that IE couldn’t “save the file to
the cache”. What?

I remembered having the same problem more than a year ago, but I
couldn’t remember the exact fix as I had a lot of small issues to
solve at the same time on that older site.

In the end I found the
problem
. A combination of specific IE versions plus the use of https plus the
presence of a Cache-control:no-cache header. You just can’t make
this sort of stuff up.

In my Plone site I solved it by tweaking my
CacheFu cache config a bit:

  • I added a separate header set with most of the cache headers off,
    especially the no-cache one.
  • I attached that header set to my “Files” rule. Tadaah, problem
    solved.

Adding this to my own blog should help in remembering it next time :-)

Reinout van Rees: IE+https download problem

Originally from Planet Plone by reinout