All browsers save Web pages they fetch on your local disk in case they need them again.
The stored pages are called the cache.
Caching improves performance since fetching
a page from the cache is much faster than asking the
remote server to send the page again.
Usually this is what you want.
However, once in a while, this is the wrong behavior.
Think about a page where sports scores
or stock quotes or election results are being updated
in real time. Then when you refresh the page, you really
want your browser to ignore the cache
and ask the server for the current page.
We have set things up tonight so that our server puts a special message in the page
telling the browser not to put the page in the cache. In principle, then a normal page refresh
will fetch a new page.
Refresh the page by clicking the icon next to the address bar or using
the keyboard like this:
MacOS: For Safari, Firefox, and Chrome: Press and hold Command and then type R
iOS and Android: Scroll to the top of the page and then pull down from the top until it responds with an icon
If you keep refreshing our main page and it remains the same too long, you can try Plan B or Plan C.
Plan B is typing the keyboard shortcut to force the browser to refresh the page from the server as follows.
MacOS: For Firefox and Chrome: Press and hold Command and Shift and then type R
MacOS: For Safari, you need to first enable the developer tools, as follows:
- Click on Safari in menu bar next to the Apple logo
- Click on settings
- Select the "Advanced" tab on top of the window
- Check the box for "Show features for web developers"
- Click somewhere outside the window to exit the menu system
Now you can force a reload of a page by holding Command + Option down and typing R
A hard refresh on a mobile device depends on the operating system and browser. Ask Google.
If none of this works, Plan C is clear the entire cache. See this page for instructions.