There might be cases when you need to "clear your browser cache". It can be an important action when you’re having issues with a website. But what does clearing your browser cache actually mean, and how do you do it for your specific browser?
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Whenever a website is visited, the web browser will save files from that site onto your computer's hard drive in something called the "browser cache". Most of the time, this is a good thing, as it helps in page loading times and speeds up your web browsing experience by eliminating the need to download all files (and probably the same files) over and over again as you browse around a web page.
For example, a logo on a webpage is unlikely to change - so it makes sense to store one version of this logo locally in your browser cache instead of having to download the logo multiple times.
However, sometimes caching certain elements of a web page can cause undesired behaviours. This is especially true in web development and when we are working with you as our client. Changes we have done to the underlying code are not always directly displayed on the (your) webpage version. This is because of the browsers caching tactics outlined above.
Let's assume your browser downloaded an image before, then changes are made to the image (eg. a filter is applied) and then we have re-uploaded it to the webpage.
The browser doesn't know about these changes and there is no easy way for the browser to find out - especially if the filename didn't change. When you load the page with the new image, the browsers renders the webpage and the image looks like before - leaving you puzzled.
This is where a so called hard refresh comes into play.
A hard refresh is a method of telling the browser "thanks for your great caching methods but this time when I load the page I want you to load all assets down again". Just like at the first time the webpage has been loaded and the cache was built for the first time. The old cache will be flushed and a new one will be build helping in resolving conflicts arising from different versions of a page.
Hard refresh or force refresh Is a method to clear the browser's cache for a specific webpage to force it to load the most recent assets (files) of a this given page. Having made a hard refresh, users can be sure that the browser downloads and displays the latest files effectively resolving file version conflicts.
We collected instructions for different browsers on how to invoke a hard refresh.
macOS
Windows/Linux