News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

August 17, 2007

tips

What did you think the reload button did?

Posted Aug. 17, ’07, 11:35 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Tips

ReloadHey, I got a hot tip for you. You listening? Good. Once upon a time, some character might have told you that sometimes you need to hold down the shift key when hitting reload in your web browser in order to make sure that it doesn’t load the page you’re viewing from a cached copy. Maybe that made sense to you, maybe it didn’t, but I’ll tell you this: it’s silly. Why else would you hit the reload button, I ask ya?

Fortunately, Apple’s with us on this one. You see, according to them:

When you reload a Web page in Safari (by clicking the Reload icon or by pressing Command-R in Mac OS X or Ctrl-R in Safari Beta 3.x for Windows), cache files are bypassed. You don’t need to hold Shift or any other modifier keys.
And that, my friends, is the way it should be.


7 Comments

David Chartier said:

Wow, nice find, and a darn good call. I've always hated the fact that the 'hold shift to make extra sure it reloads' trick even exists.

August 17, 2007 11:48 AM
Gatesbasher Author Profile Page said:

Wow! This is the first I've heard about the shift+reload trick. Now that you say it doesn't work, I'm going to try it anyway! I check one site every night for their daily update, but sometimes Safari will keep showing the previous day's page. I can clear Safari's cache, or switch to Firefox. I'm going to try the shift+reload thing tonight and just hope that you and Apple are horribly wrong!

August 17, 2007 1:05 PM
Matt said:

Whew!

August 17, 2007 3:34 PM
Footstoned said:

Safari doesn't reload Flash content when you hit reload. This wouldn't matter for most people, but as a developer working on a Flash site, it's a hassle. I can't wait to try this useless trick.

August 18, 2007 8:39 AM
Rob Cottingham said:

I thought there was a force-reload command for Safari. I probably got that apparently mistaken impression from Firefox, which has a documented force-reload command of shift-(Reload button). See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Error_loading_any_website

August 18, 2007 5:22 PM
Wondercow Author Profile Page said:

It all started way back in the '90s with Netscape and dial-up. Back when modems were modems (they actually MOdulated and DEModulated a signal) and the fastest speed was 2400 bps, or maybe 9600 bps. Back in the day the reload button would indeed reload from the cache, it was *way* faster than pulling the page down from the server. And, sure enough, if you wanted to force it to reload from the server you could - by holding down the 'shift' key.

August 20, 2007 8:26 AM
Gatesbasher Author Profile Page said:

I know this thread's a week old, and everybody's probably lost interest, but I wanted to make absolutely sure: My test case is Project Gutenberg; they usually update their site every night at 1:30 A.M. (Pacific Time.) Sometimes I get the previous day's page long after that, but clearing my cache or switching to Firefox fixes it. I've had this problem three times this week, and shift-reload works like a charm! Old page--shift-reload--new page. I don't know what to tell you or Apple, but those are the facts.

August 25, 2007 1:48 AM

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