Just experienced this in Firefox 3, not sure whether it is desired behavior, but discussed it with a fellow dev and we think it is not.
I had an ajax request as follows: var myData = null; $.ajax({ 'url' : 'foo.php', 'data' : myData, 'type' : 'POST', 'dataType' : 'json', 'success' : function(j) { // whatever } }); Client was reporting a 411 HTTP response code on the request -- their proxy was expecting a Content-length header on the request, and wasn't getting one. This also occurred if myData was undefined. It did *not* occur when myData was {}. We hadn't detected this error internally because our requests weren't proxy'd. It seems Content-length should always be there, and should be 0 if myData is null or undefined. However, I'm not sure whether this is just a Firefox issue, or something that jQuery should address in the spirit of abstracting away browser differences?