You browsers history and cache, and cookies

Voila Media Group

January 13, 2011 0 Comment

Cache 22 – wait the site hasn’t changed? Are there sinister forces working against you? You don’t see the latest changes and everyone else does?
Nope no conspiracy, and probably not a gremlin, but rather your browser’s cache.
The web browser uses several tools to help the user out. It does several things automatically – it remembers sites so that you can get back to them, data that you may use frequently in the site and files from that site so that they load more quickly.

Here is a quick breakdown of these features.

History – the browser stores the pages that you’ve most recently viewed so that you can get back to these paged more quickly.

Cache – the browser stores a copy of the images, media, and scripts locally so that the site loads more quickly when loaded the next time.
This is awesome because it speeds up your favorite sites loading but not awesome for when there is a change. If the site changes and you are still viewing the cached version sometimes you need to clear your cache so that you can get the latest version of the page.

Clear your browsers Cache: http://www.hosting.com/support/info/clearbrowsercache

**Quick tip: On some browsers you can hold down the shift key and push the reload / refresh button in the browser. This will tell the browser to grab the latest version of the page from the server.

Cookies – What? I want cookies. Cookies store data that a site needs to remember.
Your shopping cart or your login (remember me)

Next Week: TBD Browser goodness