Difference between F5, Control F5, Click+Reload in various browsers

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41 points·chime··8 comments

I find it irritating that there's no way to force an update in Chrome other than clicking on the wrench icon-->Options-->Under the Hood-->Clear browsing data...-->Empty the cache->Clear browsing data. I used to imagine I was forcing an update by shift-clicking the refresh button, but now I know I was only fooling myself.

A lot has changed since Chrome 1.0.154.48. See this Chrome issue thread: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1906. I think one could always force a reload with Ctrl+F5.

Are you sure? I was testing this a couple of weeks ago. Shift-clicking refresh causes a forced resend in Chrome for our app. We don't use if-modified-since but we do use if-none-match, and Chrome definitely doesn't send it in that case. (But IE6 and IE7 do.)

The question misses one point - a full (no-cache) refresh in Firefox is done with Ctrl+Shift+R. Most (if not all) browsers support Ctrl+r for refreshing the page as well, but i'm not sure what headers are sent in each one.

There are some related notes about reload at http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2010/02/reload....

As an aside, F5 in Firefox 3+ has a long-standing bug with iframes: the new iframe src= in the DOM structure is ignored, and Firefox makes a request to an older iframe src=. This also happens after session recovery. Another bug claims that iframe targets are sometimes mixed up, which implies some broken internal cache.

I've seen the last case on my "what are people Liking" page which consists of a bunch of iframes served by Facebook. Good to know it only affects FF.

Well, I was moderately annoyed to find out that only browsers on Windows XP were tested.

well why don't you do some tests and post them up somewhere instead of just complaining!

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