Help, my Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge shows me old or broken content

Table of contents

To force your browser to load the current content, just press a key combination:

Windows:

Hold the -button and then click on the "Reload" icon
Hold the -key and press the F5

Mac:

Hold the + buttons and press the "R" (Reload) button

If your browser is particularly stubborn, simply use the incognito mode and enter the URL there.

Background

The changes are put online, we notify our customers about them and we get the feedback. We then get the feedback more often:

"Everything still looks the same for me" or

"But now the website is completely broken!"

... In most cases, the whole thing is not so bad. For most visitors, the website looks fine, just not for your case in particular, if you have loaded the website only recently and your browser has been open since then.

The "browser cache" is responsible for this. Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Safari temporarily store content on the computer to save loading time.

It can then happen that although the HTML changes are reloaded from the server, an old script library responsible for the design or function is still cached on your computer, leading to unpredictable behaviour.

This laziness of not constantly making requests are there to increase the loading speed but sometimes you just want to see the latest change and all the images, all the libraries and all the rest should be freshly downloaded from the server.

Redirections are particularly stubborn. If a URL has been redirected and then this redirection has been undone, a browser can be very stubborn and display the old redirection no matter how often you refresh.

If you don't want to wait for the problem to go away on its own after some time (because it does), you can manually clear the browser cache. Here are the common solutions:

Mozilla Firefox on the laptop or desktop PC: