Curiosity Killed the Cache

So, I was working in Chrome the other day, and I noticed something when I moused over the reload button. Normally I just hit F5, but I happened to have my hand on the mouse at that time. When I did this, I noticed something I hadn't seen before.

There was a tooltip telling me that the button would "Reload this page," but also, "hold to see more options." Well, of course, I pressed and held the mouse button over the Reload icon and was rewarded with this pop-up:


Sweet! I often need to make sure I do a hard reload so I don't used cached files, and usually check and uncheck that setting in the Network tab of the Chrome Developer Tools. This seemed like a nice option to have. 

I also learned that in addition to the F5 reload, I could access it with Ctrl-R for a simple reload, and Ctrl-Shift-R for a hard reload. I remember hearing about those shortcuts a while ago, but always had preferred F5 for some reason. However, with laptop keyboards giving the F-keys double duty these days, I'll likely shift to the Ctrl-R option. (note: these shortcuts are for Windows. Mac users have to use some other archaic key combination. Does anyone still use Macs?)

What was really cool is even though there isn't a shortcut key for it, you can also completely empty the cache and then do a hard reload, essentially force loading all page elements and third party references in one click. Nice!

But of course, that's not the end of the story...

A few days later, I'm browsing on a website and having trouble logging in or something. I thought I'd try my new hard-reload long mouse-click method. 

But the magic menu didn't appear. Was I on a different version of Chrome? Was it some obscure setting I had to toggle? I didn't know, and fatigue won out over curiosity for that night.

Then I was at work, and noticed the magic menu wasn't appearing on this computer like it had before either. What was different? (hint: there's a clue in my screen shots!)

Then it hit me. I opened up the Chrome Developer Tools F12 (or Ctrl-Shift-I for my F-key hobbled laptop) and tried again. There it was! It was only available while I was using the Developer Tools. Makes sense. 

It may seem like a trivial thing, but the number of times I see someone navigate to their browser settings to empty their cache is soul crushing. Now I have an easy to use tip to pass along.

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