Blog – The Architect’s Log

When you view a web page for the first time your browser downloads all the various page elements (images, text, etc.) to your computer’s hard drive. This is known as “browser caching.” The next time you visit that same web page, your browser first looks in it’s cache and displays the stored copy rather than downloading everything again. This makes web browsing much quicker. For example, if you press your ‘back’ button to a page you just visited it will appear almost instantly, without having to download all those images again.

Since web pages often change, it’s a good idea to refresh your browser window and clear your browser’s cache regularly.

Refresh Steps:

1. Press your browser’s ‘refresh/reload’ button of the ‘F5′ key.
   The page should visually flicker and appear to reload itself.
2. If that doesn’t work, try a hard refresh, by holding down the ‘Shift’ key and pressing ‘refresh/reload’.
3. If you’re still seeing old content, dump your browser’s cache using the directions below.

Dump Browser Cache Steps: (Internet Explorer)

1. In the ‘Tools’ menu, choose ‘Internet Options’
2. Click ‘Delete Files’ in the ‘Temporary Internet Files’ area of the ‘General tab’
3. Click ‘OK’

Browser Cookies and History
While you’re dumping your browser cache, you might also want to consider dumping your cookies and clearing your browser history. Web sites you’ve visited and cookies from web sites you log in to create small files on your computer. It’s a good idea to clean these files out once in a while. The options for cleaning these areas up are located in the same place as the cache clean up functions.

We usually dump our browser cache and cookies on a weekly basis.

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