Along the left, you’ll see the different types of Storage and Cache, and you can explore (as well as change/delete) those things there:īe a little careful! Deleting cookies can do things like log you out of websites. If you suspect any of these for being a culprit of misbehavior, open the DevTools and go to the Application tab. Those are things like cookies, localStorage, and Service Workers. The caching of actual files like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images are mostly what we’re talking about here, but there is other things that sometimes can use a flush to start working in an expected way again. I have that on pretty much all the time so I’m always getting fresh files no matter what. Command-Option-i will open up the DevTools and under the Network tab you’ll see a checkbox along the top bar to disable the cache: There is no way to disable caching all the time in Chrome, but you can disable it during development of websites by using this checkbox in the DevTools. Choose “all time” if you’re trying to be comprehensive. You’ll have options in there for what you want to clear (“cached images and files” being the important part for our purposes) and from when you’d like to clear. The standard way to clear all cache is Chrome Settings > Advanced > Clear Browsing Data. In any case, let’s look at all the caching mechanisms in Chrome (this goes for most browsers though) and how to clear it.

Or you might just be security-concerned and want to clear the cache to make sure old data isn’t sitting around on disk. You might be clearing cache because you’re looking at a site – your own or someone else’s – and the content or design doesn’t seem to be loading the correct files from your computer or the server. It’s often said that caching is one of the hardest problems in computer science, and they aren’t joking at all. But sometimes things just get weird and you have to. 99.9% of the time, everything is fine and you don’t need to manage the cache yourself. Done wrong, we might get old content and old design rather than updated versions.

But it’s also tricky! It’s really the websites job, not ours as users, to make sure that cache is handled well. This is a major feature of web browsers and it alone is responsible for much of the speed we get out of websites.

“Caching” is when, rather than fetching a new copy of an asset like an image, HTML, CSS, or JavaScript file from the internet, the browser uses a copy it has already saved.

Chrome force refresh of css file