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Thursday 30 August 2007

Keyboard shortcut of the week: refreshing changes

Need to refresh or reload the web page you are looking at? Press the F5 key.

If the web page still doesn't appear or does not look right you could try Ctrl + F5 (hold down the Ctrl key and press F5). This keyboard shortcut bypasses any copy of the web page that may be stored on your PC. Web browsers will keep a copy of web pages you visit in something called a cache, which they will access first when you return to that page.

See the last post on Bloody Computer! for information about clearing this cache in Internet Explorer. If you use Firefox you can empty the cache by following these instructions:

  • In Firefox, go to the 'Tools' menu and select 'Options..'
  • Click on the 'Advanced' icon
  • Click on the 'Network' tab
  • There you will find a button labeled 'Clear now', pressing this will empty the cache.

2 comments:

FiddyP said...

great tip, I'm always surprised when people have never seen an F5 refresh when I show them!

here's another, press F6 and it highlights the address in the address bar ready to be written over with a new address

Borkiman said...

Thanks for the tip gltych, that was a new one to me - we all live and learn. Works fine on IE.

I use Firefox and have the Google Toolbar placed on menu bar and pressing F6 highlights the search field on that. I moved the toolbar further down and F6 highlighted the address field as you said. Either way a very useful shortcut that I will make use of.