Query string performance tuning suggestion from a tool

Question

Remove query strings from static resources

Most proxies, most notably Squid up through version 3.0, do not cache resources with a "?" in their URL even if a Cache-control: public header is present in the response. To enable proxy caching for these resources, remove query strings from references to static resources, and instead encode the parameters into the file names themselves.

/?qa=image&qa_blobid=14251717397400842271&qa_size=30
/qa-plugin/q2a-social-share-master/css/social-share.css?1.6.1
/qa-plugin/q2a-social-share-master/fonts/social-icon.ttf?-p1x0ul
/qa-theme/SnowFlat/fonts/fontello.woff?70015067
/qa-theme/SnowFlat/fonts/ubuntu.css?1.7.4
/qa-theme/SnowFlat/images/spinner-icon-14x14.gif?1410117644
/qa-theme/SnowFlat/qa-styles.css?1.7.4

I ran an online performance test against my website and was give the above suggestion to improve performance. Does this make sense  and Is there anything we can do ? 

Answer 1

That advice isn't true for regular web browsers so doesn't apply for the vast majority of users. And it sounds like it's no longer true for Squid either.

Note: even if the file is not cached by the proxy, it will still be cached in the user's browser, so there is not really any problem.

The reason for the query string is so that when Q2A is updated, we can change the query string so users get the updated file.