For performance reasons, browsers may "cache" previously viewed web pages. This means that it saves a copy of the web page, images, or other content so that if you visit that page again in the near future, it can simply bring up that page that was saved on your computer's hard disk instead of connecting across the internet to the web server to pull the same page.
This works perfectly fine most of the time since browsers has mechanisms to detect when a web page had changed and would "expire" the cache and pull fresh data as necessary. However, sometimes during web page development or when your web designer makes some changes to the site on the web server, the browser may not realized that the web page had changed. It would pull the old saved data causing you to view an "outdated" page.
To remedy this and ensure that you are viewing the latest data and force the browser to pull content from the webserver, you need to delete the browser's cache and do a hard-refresh.
The steps are different depending on your browser version:
To clear cache in Internet Explorer 8
To clear Browser Cache in Firefox 3.5
To clear Browser Cache in Firefox 3.0
1. Go to menu "Tools -> Internet Options".
2. In the "Internet Options" dialog, click the "Delete..." button.
3. In the "Delete Browsing History" dialog, make sure "Temporary Internet files" is checkmarked and click the "Delete" button.
4. Once the files have been deleted, you can dismiss the "Internet Options" dialog by clicking the "Okay" button.
5. Do a hard-refresh of the webpage by holding the Ctrl key and then clicking the browser's Refresh button. Alternatively, press Ctrl-F5.
1. Go to "Tools -> Clear Recent History" (or press Ctrl+Shift+Del)
2. In the Clear Recent History dialog, select Everything for the time range to clear. Checkmark Cache and click button Clear Now
1. Go to "Tools -> Clear Private Data"
2. In the "Clear Private Data" dialog that comes up, make sure Cache is checkmarked, and click "Clear Private Data Now".
3. Do a hard-refresh of the webpage by holding the Ctrl key and then clicking the browser's Refresh button. Alternatively, press Ctrl-F5.
