How to Ignore Cache When Refreshing Web Pages in Safari, Firefox, Chrome

There are many occasions where you may need to refresh a webpage and that web sites cache, ignoring any locally stored cache files on the Mac so that you can pull a fresh version of a website from the web browser. Being able to ignore existing cached pages when loading a website is very useful and it’s quite simple. This is sometimes called a force refresh, and you can do it with every single browser app out there.

With that in mind, here is how to refresh a webpage and ignore the existing cached files in the most popular Mac OS X web browsers: Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Camino. We’re going to cover all common web browser apps in Mac OS X so that regardless of what your default browser is set to on the Mac, you’ll be able to force reset the cache on a webpage if you need to.

How to Force Refresh Web Pages & Refresh Cache in Web Browsers for Mac

Each of these options or commands will dump existing page cache, force the cache to refresh for the active web site or page, and load new cache for that page to the Mac.

You’ll find some of these force refresh options are the same in the browsers for Mac OS X as they are in some other operating systems, depending on their browsers of course, including some in Windows and Linux.

Since most of the keystrokes are similar it should be relatively easy to remember which is great, because for users who need to refresh without cache this quite useful and you will use them often.

While this can be helpful for anyone who uses the web, it’ll be of particular interest to web developers and designers, whether on a professional basis or just a hobby aspect. A sizable portion of computer and Mac users have been involved in some kind of web posting, creation, commenting, social networking, development or similar things before, and sometimes refreshing a webpage without cache can be the way to reveal the change, even if it’s a comment on a website or a post to a social network, or making a personal homepage, using some of the iCloud services, making a public photo sharing web page, publishing a blog, or even outright full fledged development or design of a website. So, whether a casual user or developer or not, now you know how to refresh any web content and dump the cache to load a fresh version.

It’s worth pointing out that refreshing a webpage without loading cache is not the same as clearing all cache from a web browser, it simply clears the old cache for the website that is refreshed, forcing new cache to generate as the page loads from the server. Of course you can clear cache from web browsers if needed, you can learn about clearing and emptying cache in Safari, or clearing cache in Chrome, if either is required.