Browser Cache
What is Browser Cache?
What is browser cache? (Hint: It’s not internet cash.) You’ve all heard of the word cache before but some people don’t know what it is but don’t know what it is in the context of the web. In common parlance, caching means placing something in storage (usually in secret) on the chance that it may come in useful later (e.g. a weapons cache). A browser or Web cache does exactly that, except with program and website assets. When you visit a website, your browser takes pieces of the page and stores them on your computer’s hard drive. Well browser cache is a way of making websites load faster for you when you’re browsing the internet.
How does it work?
What happens is when you visit a website for the first time, you’re browser (Chrome, Safari, IE, Firefox), basically downloads a copy of that website and it stores it on your computers hard drive. This means that when you’re browsing around that website it loads really fast because a lot of the resources on that website is stored on your computer rather than having to be pulled down across the internet each time. Some of these resources include html files, CSS style sheets, Javascript scrips, as well as graphic images and other multimedia content.
- Browser: Yo! You got index.html?
- Server: (Looking it up…)
- Sever: Totally, dude! It’s right here!
- Browser: That’s rad, I’m downloading it now and showing the user.
Why do they always tell me to clear my cache?
Browser caches can generally be a really good thing to have because it makes browsing the web a lot faster. However, cache can sometimes be a problem if you’re a web developer and for the user. What can happen as a web developer is, you can make changes to your CSS or other elements on that page and when you go to view that page, it doesn’t look quite right or you can’t see the changes that you’ve just added, or its just broken. Generally, what’s going on here is that when you’re looking at that web page, it’s pulling it from your browser cache rather than downloading it from the internet therefore your changes aren’t being reflected.
How do you fix the problem?
So what now? When this happens, you need to clear your cache. Which basically just cleans out all the websites your browser has downloaded and starts fresh and downloads it again next time you visit that page. Just visit the more tools option on your browser of choice and make sure that cached images and files is ticked off!
Windows Shortcut: Press [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Delete]
Mac Shortcut: Press [Cmd] + [Shift] + [Delete]
Some people turn caching off entirely! This is okay if you have a very fast internet connection. Caching was designed to help response time for slower connections.
Conclusion
So, that brings us to the end of my cache blog. In conclusion, you should schedule yourself to clear your cache regularly. This will help your browsing experience as fast and accurate as possible. When you think that you are getting the wrong information from a website, remember to try clearing the cache to see if that clears it up. I hope you found this useful and now you know what cache is, how to clear it, and why you you should clear it.
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