[aoli-al]

I'm the author of the post.

I'm not sure Chrome's current caching behavior is helpful because the second response does not indicate which part of the data is returned. So, the application has no choice but to discard the data.

But thank you for your comments. This helped me to crystalize why I think this is a bug.

[mananaysiempre]

Yeah, if there's no way to tell from the request which range has actually been returned that seems like a deal-breaker. The spec’s allowance for a partial response is explicitly motivated by the response being self-describing, and if after Chrome’s creative reinterpretation it is not, then it’s not clear what the client could even do.

[ajross]

There's no clear way to define "correct" in this case regardless. The whole premise behind a range request is that the data is immutable (because otherwise it wouldn't make sense to be able to fetch it piecewise), and it's mutating here by disappearing! What are you supposed to do, really? The answer is always going to be app-dependent, the browser can't get it right because the server is being obtuse and confusing.

When we handle this in the hardware world it's via algorithms that know about the mutability of the cached data and operate on top of primitives like "flush" and "invalidate" that can restore the inconsistent memory system to a known state. HTTP didn't spec that stuff, but the closest analog is "fetch it again", which is exactly what the suggested workaround is in the bug.