Sunday, April 15, 2007

Bypassing Your Browser's Cache

As your browse the web, your browser frequently stores many parts of a web page (content, images, javascript etc.) into a so-called "cache" located in your computer's hard drive. This is done with the belief that certain parts of a web page won't change much, for example a company's logo.

But because of this, you might find that sometimes your browser refuses to download the latest data from a web site but instead uses the outdated data stored in its cache. Refreshing might help, but certain elements of a web page may still be retrieved from the cache.

When this happens, you have to be hard on your browser by forcing it to do a "hard refresh", i.e. bypassing your browser's cache entirely. Listed below are the ways to do this for different browsers.

Internet Explorer

either: Hold the Control key, and press F5.
or: Hold the Control key, and click the Refresh button on the toolbar.

Firefox, Netscape (versions 6.x and 7.x) and SeaMonkey.

either: Hold down the Control key, and press F5. On an Apple Mac, use the Command key instead of Control.
or: Hold down the Control key, and click the Reload button on the navigation toolbar.

Safari

either: Hold down the Command and Shift keys, and press R.
or: Hold down the Shift key and click the Reload toolbar button.

Opera doesn't have an option to do a hard refresh, so if a normal refresh does not seem to work, you'll have to clear the cache by going to 'Tools' > 'Delete private data'. Click 'Details', make sure that 'Delete entire cache' is selected, and then choose any other data you want to remove.

3 comments:

krishna kashyap av said...

Thanks for the post...
really good one...
Work from home

Anonymous said...

My friend and I were recently talking about how modern society has evolved to become so integrated with technology. Reading this post makes me think back to that debate we had, and just how inseparable from electronics we have all become.


I don't mean this in a bad way, of course! Societal concerns aside... I just hope that as the price of memory falls, the possibility of transferring our brains onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It's a fantasy that I daydream about almost every day.


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