Ireland Information Guide saves bandwidth by instructing your web browser to store pages in your local cache (normally on your hard drive).

Sometimes this has the undesired and confusing result that after making a change you still see the old version of a page, or other abnormalities appear.

When you encounter odd behaviour take a few seconds to either specifically ask to reload, or clear your cache so that the page has to be reloaded because of lack of a cached copy.

Do this before reporting the problem. If the problem persists, see Ireland Information Guide:bug reports.

How to Clear Your Cache

Internet Explorer

Reload a page bypassing the cache

• Option 1: Hold control and press F5.
• Option 2: Hit the Refresh button in the navigation toolbar.

Really clear the cache

Click on 'Tools' and then 'Internet Options' and choose the 'General' tab. In the 'Temporary Internet files' section, click 'Delete Files'. You will then get a dialogue box asking if you want to delete just the temporary files, or all offline content'. Choose the latter and click 'OK'.

Settings

Also you may want to check the settings regarding the use of cache at Tools / Internet options / Temporary Internet files / Settings. There is an option "Check for a new version every time a page is visited." Even with that on, you sometimes have to use F5, though.

Mozilla and Most Subclasses

Reload a page bypassing the cache

• Option 1: Hold control and press R (control and F5 will usually work too).
• Option 2: Hit the Reload button in the navigation toolbar.

Really clear the cache

From the 'Edit' or 'Tools' menu, choose 'Preferences' or 'Options'. Expand the 'Advanced' options and choose 'Cache' or 'Privacy'. Click the button called 'Clear Cache'.

For Mozilla Firefox, go to 'Options' in the 'Tools' menu and click on 'Privacy' (picture of a key) in the sidebar of the window that pops up. Click the 'Clear' button that is next to the word 'Cache'. If you want to turn the cache off, click on the word cache and tell the computer to allocate 0 KB to store the cache in.

Server cache

The servers also use a cache, for pages for users who do not log in, because for those the webpage is the same (not dependent on preferences, and no user name or IP address on the page) and is invalidated when an edit is made. The use of this cache is demonstrated by e.g. 24 November, 01:40 UTC (using {{CURRENTDAY}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}, {{CURRENTTIME}}) not being updated when refreshing at the user side if one is not logged in.

The cache for redirect pages contains the rendered HTML-page of the target. A bug is that it is not invalidated when the target page is updated.