TLDR: This is simply a “hard refresh” button.
Just click on it to reload the current Chrome tab ignoring the previously cached content…
How to Hard Refresh Your Browser and Why You Might Need To
What is a Hard Refresh?
A hard refresh is a way of refreshing your Chrome browser. It clears out cache and logs, which can help fix problems caused by extensions, settings, or a lack of updated content.
This is a feature that most people don’t know about or use. It is a more or less “hidden” feature that most people don’t even know about. Webmasters and developers use it all the time (F12+long click anyone?) but a hard refresh can be very helpful in some cases even for the average chrome user: for example, where you are experiencing bugs on some page caused by old cache, extensions, settings, or some other content mismatch on the site you are visiting.
How to perform hard refresh without our extension?
Every Browser comes with it’s own shortcut combination. For example for Chrome, Edge or Firefox on Windows you should use Ctrl+F5, but on Mac it is Cmd+Shift+R. On safary there are two commands: Opt+Cmd+E followed by Cmd+Shift+R; Opera uses Ctrl+R etc.
Why using our extension?
What makes it useful is that it sits among the other extensions in the toolbar, you can move it where you need it to stay and there are a few very useful customization options:
- you can change the icon to fit your browser theme (few pre-made versions available and you can even set your own icon)
- you can add it to the context menu
- and — the most important — you can set exactly what to be cleared, for example, you may decide to clear the cookies too
Hard Refresh Options:
To open the settings page rght click on the extension icon and select “Options”.
Here you can select what you want to be cleared, for the current page (site), when you click the “hard refresh” button:
- Delete cookies
- Clear file systems
- Clear indexed data
- Delete local storage data
- Clean plugin data
- Clear service workers
- Delete webSQL data
Please, keep in mind that some of these can lead to “interesting” behavior: for example, every time I force-clear cookies on my wordpress site, it takes me out of the control panel. Use them with caution on case-per-case basis.
Conclusion: an extension aimed for developer but usable for anyone who wants some more control on his/her browser
If you feel some page is not quite right, clear the cache and refresh with our extension 😉
Normal Reload, Hard Reload, Empty Cache and Reload: What’s the Difference? And what are those 4 types of page refresh?
Bear with me…
If you open the Developer Console and long-click on the “Reload this page” button (top-left on Chrome) you’ll see popup menu with these options:
- normal reload
- hard reload
- empty cache and hard reload
But what on earth these do mean at all? Well, its not so complicated:
1) Normal Reload
A normal reload is done in order to refresh the content in the browser window. The refresh will use the cache (data stored by the web browser so that it may load pages faster).
2) Hard reload
Don’t use anything from the cache when making the request. (which is equal to SHIFT+F5) Force the browser to re-download ignoring cached files.
3) Empty Cache and Hard Reload
If the cache is empty, then it’s page load time will be increased because it has to reload. This will, as with the hard refresh, mean that the browser will need to download all of the image & content again. Still, if the page calls for another resources after the loading (trough delayed JavaScript for example), some of these additional resources might still be in the cache. That is why emptying the cache will help in more situations than just ignoring the cache, because it will clear any additional leftovers in the cache.
And here it comes, the forth one:
4) Our extension
But why using special extension?
1) Because there are more cleaning options. Our “Hard Refresh” button can clear a lot more than the “Empty Cache+Hard Reload” option.
2) It does not require opening the developer tools
3) It is customizable, you can, for example, made the “hard refresh” icon red, knowing that this will always be different than the regular reload button
If you like this extension, why not try some of our others, like the Downloads button or some of our new tab wallpapers?
