A Little Refreshment: Reloading the Current Page

If a website has changed, you often don't see the changes right away. A few sites, such as Facebook, do dynamically update the website, which usually makes this tip unnecessary. However, occasionally Facebook and similar websites do fail to update, and most websites will still need manual refreshing. Here's what to do if you suspect the website on your screen isn't the most recent version.

1: Refreshing a Page The Refresh button has been moved all over the screen by many major browsers lately. It's usually either next to the Back and Forward buttons or at the end of the address bar.

To reload the page, just click the button. Most of the time this will load the most recent copy of the page with no problems.

2: Really Refreshing a Page Sometimes your browser thinks it's smarter than you, and when you push Refresh it just loads a copy from your computer's cache. (The cache stores copies of frequently accessed Web resources on your computer so that pages can be loaded more quickly.) So even after you've pushed Refresh, you may not actually have the site's most recent version.

If you're suspicious that you still don't have the latest version of a site, simply hold down the Ctrl key while hitting Refresh. This will disallow loading from the cache and force a full copy of the page to be downloaded from the Web. (A few browsers use Shift instead, so if it still doesn't work it can't hurt to try that as well.)

3: Keyboard Shortcuts I'm a big fan of keyboard shortcuts. I use Refresh several times a day, so I get really annoyed by having to try to click the button every time I need it, especially since it's in different places in different browsers. So the handy shortcut for Refresh is F5. (This also works in combination with Ctrl; see section 2.)

If you don't like F5 for whatever reason, a few browsers also accept Control-R.

4: Refreshing Other Stuff The refresh concept (and the F5 keyboard shortcut) also works for folders on your computer. If you save a new file in a folder, for example, but currently have a window open showing that folder, the folder may not display the new file. Pressing F5 will tell it to look for files again, thus showing your new file. If your desktop isn't displaying changes, you can use this trick there too: click anywhere on the desktop, then press F5.

-- Soren "scorchgeek" Bjornstad http://thetechnicalgeekery.com

If you have found an error or notable omission in this tip, please leave a comment or email me: webmaster@thetechnicalgeekery.com.

Copyright 2011 Soren Bjornstad. Verbatim copying and redistribution of part or all of this article is permitted, provided this notice is preserved.