They have asks to turn off caching on our browsers. I was aghast that they would ask such a thing.

I said to them;

To avoid caching it is best practice to use;

<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache" />
<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache" />

This should work across all browsers.

Their reply was;

We need to refresh javascript at runtime, this will not help us – any more ideas?

I replied;

Unsure what you mean by “refresh  javascript at runtime”.
If you are using ajax, browser caching can effect the XMLHttpRequest open method.
Adding these meta tags to the source has fixed this for me in the past.

Browser caching only caches resources, it should have no effect on site scripting.
These meta tags will bypass browser caching.

This is a reasonable request, isn't it?