351

In Firefox, I occasionally need to clear my cache to fix a website. But clearing the entire cache seems like extreme overkill. Is there any way to just clear the one site from my cache?

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  • 2
    When I need to debug my site with the Cookie cleaned frequently, I often use the private browsing mode. It will clean everything automatically. Hope this can fit your scenario. Dec 4, 2015 at 9:55
  • It's not possible to achieve this by clicking the padlock in the URL bar as per this answer superuser.com/a/1826298/204155 Feb 13 at 18:41

16 Answers 16

332
  1. Select the Firefox Menu button (three horizontal lines on the right).
  2. Select Library.
  3. Select History.
  4. Scroll to the bottom and select Show All History.
  5. Search for the site using the Search History field in the upper-right corner.
  6. Within the results, right-click the appropriate page and select Forget About This Site.

Note: This will clear saved passwords for the site as well.

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  • 7
    You're still here! Three and a half years later. :) To answer you: yep, "yesterday". Thanks for the kudos.
    – zylstra
    Mar 26, 2014 at 18:52
  • 6
    This is a great alternative to CTRL+F5 when you want to remove the cache of a website which redirects you to another website (in which case CTRL+F5 only force refreshes the redirected website).
    – Sicco
    Sep 4, 2014 at 14:35
  • 18
    A good answer but people need to know about the problem! So: W A R N I N G: This will clear ALL info about that web site including cookie and passwords.
    – IceCold
    Jan 30, 2015 at 16:03
  • 4
    Also, if that site is localhost, it will lose data for all localhost sites that you're developing, which is, for me anyway, far more than I want to clear. Jul 3, 2015 at 12:41
  • 8
    The question was to delete the site from the browser cache, and not from the history. This answer is bad.
    – peterh
    Nov 22, 2016 at 11:00
46

If you want to do a force-refresh, which is what I think you want to do, hit CTRL+F5. And of course, Cmd+F5 on a Mac. Works on Chrome too.

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  • 4
    loads voiceover in osx 10.6.7 Apr 7, 2011 at 22:37
  • 9
    CMD + SHIFT + R ... the function keys are per default used by OSX. Oct 17, 2011 at 9:32
  • 5
    That's not necessarily true. Resources like html templates are cached every time I'm trying to develop. Apr 2, 2012 at 18:19
  • 4
    any idea how to do this for a page that was using a 301 redirect to another domain, but is no longer? I haven't been able to hit ctrl-F5 fast enough, and the redirect keeps happening Apr 18, 2012 at 5:06
  • 27
    Don't understand why this answer get's upvoted so much as it's both wrong and doesn't answer the question. Ajax calls, css files, redirects keep being cached (or redirects). The only sure way would be an option to remove history from a certain domain like with removing cookies. Another way is to start firefox with a different (cleaned) profile.
    – HMR
    Sep 15, 2013 at 3:18
9

Please note that there is currently no way to clear cached HTTP redirects (at least 301 type) without using a plugin.

Ctrl+F5 / Cmd+F5 does not work as you are being immediately redirected to the target URL so you can not refresh the original one.

So I used "CacheViewer" Firefox plugin mentioned here before to deal with this. Update: as of 2023 this addon is not available anymore and I was not able to find another that would replace it. :(

See also this bug in Firefox for details and possible progress on this issue.

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  • You may try with turning on the warning before redirect, in the Prefs → Advanced → General → Accessibility. But this pref does not work in all cases. Apr 27, 2014 at 7:13
  • 1
    I wonder if that Firefox bug isn't simply about 301 Moved Permanently redirects, which are, well, designed to be permanent. If Firefox would indeed cache 302 Found, then that would indeed be a bug.
    – Arjan
    Jul 24, 2015 at 7:13
  • You are generally right about 301 @Arjan but I would say it's at least a questionable behaviour to cache a redirect resulting in 4xx/5xx response. And also not being able to clear these redirects cache without a third-party tool seems to be more like a bug than a lack of a feature.. Jul 24, 2015 at 13:12
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this addon will allow you view and delete specific cache entries from memory and disk - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2489/

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  • 5
    Sadly, the addon is not available anymore at present.
    – equaeghe
    Nov 30, 2013 at 21:43
  • 3
    Have a look at this addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/cacheviewer2
    – iceteea
    Dec 3, 2013 at 10:25
  • This add-on is not in stable version. Apr 27, 2014 at 6:50
  • Apparently, this add-on cannot be hot-installed. This is too bad. I need to make some specific sites work again in Firefox, without relaunching Firefox. Apr 27, 2014 at 6:52
  • @iceteea — This add-on CacheViewer2 is not in stable version. And, apparently, this add-on cannot be hot-installed. This is too bad. I need to make some specific sites work again in Firefox, without relaunching Firefox. Apr 27, 2014 at 6:54
5

Looks like they might of changed a few things. I found the following:

  1. Menu -> Options
  2. Privacy & Security -> Site Data -> Settings
  3. Highlight the Selected Site and select Remove Selected
  4. Select Save Changes
  5. Finally click Remove

Settings Dialog Remove Selected Dialog Confirmation Dialog

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  • I could be wrong but it looks like this option only selects sites that have stored temporary data. For those sites, yes, it clears cookies and everything else. For a site that has not stored temporary data, it doesn't appear in the list so you can't just clear cookies. However! If you Clear All Data, it does get all sites somehow. Ugh - as I just did while entering this text. I think this specific feature needs some more testing.
    – TonyG
    Feb 19, 2018 at 20:53
  • Thanks. Works perfectly.
    – Dani-Br
    Aug 15, 2022 at 14:23
5

Another approach would be to use Firefox's containers - create a fresh container tab/window using (using a container add-on e.g. Temporary containers, or Mozilla's Multi-account container add-on) and load your site in that container - a fresh/temporary container will have empty login, cache etc so will act like you've cleared these.

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There is no built in way to clear the cache of specific pages/sites in Firefox. You can "Forget about this site" which cleans the domain from history, you can "Delete this page" which cleans the specific page from history, but you can't clean up single cache items belonging to a page (apart from going to your profile folder and deleting them).

There may be addons to do this, but I didn't find anything when looking through them. Built-In functionality for cache deletion seems to have the all-or-nothing policy.

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  • 2
    Where are the options you mentioned for "Forget about this site" and "Delete this page"?
    – Mar
    Jun 20, 2012 at 17:16
  • @mouseas, at least the history sidebar (Ctrl-H). May 17, 2013 at 21:20
  • @mouseas Those two commands are at the bottom of the right-click menu of any individual page in history, in the History window or sidebar. Jul 18, 2013 at 19:18
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One day when you have not opened anything else, go to Tools ⇨ Clear recent history and then select to only clear the cache and then only from today or Xtime. Because you just visited the website, it should have moved its timestamps in the cache to the top of the list so you can just wipe all cache from Firefox for that day and thus clear the cache for your specific website.

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  • A lot of trouble to go to for such a trivial purpose. Nov 19, 2012 at 22:04
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I'm kinda late to the party here, but I wanted to leave this answer for people who found this thread through googling like I did. The problem was solved for me by accessing Firefox's profile selector (Windows -> Run -> "Firefox.exe -p"), using a new profile and visiting the website from there. Then when I went back to my regular profile, the website began working normally again! Opening it on the other profile must have refreshed my regular profile's cache with non-corrupt versions of the files.

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There's a similar question and answers shortly are:

  • You can use Firefox by 2 profiles.
  • There's a extension named CookieMonster may works for you.
  • There are two add-ons for FF that every web developer needs and they are Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug, the Firebug extension YSlow comes in very handy too.
    Web Developer Toolbar has great cache and cookie control down to individual cookies.
  • Ctrl-F5 is enough usually.
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  • 6
    Those are mostly for cookies. I just care about dropping a domain from cache. Aug 7, 2010 at 20:54
  • 1
    Thank you for this summary. But Cookie Monster is not a cookie. Cookie Monster is an extension for Firefox. Apr 27, 2014 at 7:00
  • @NicolasBarbulesco Right, I changed the text. Apr 27, 2014 at 9:16
1

In what seems to be a just released Firefox extension, the original question now has an answer which is both a direct solution to the problem posed (not how to also remove cookies, passwords, etc from the selected domain which happens through the use of "Forget about this site") and will handle websites which utilise a page redirect rather than a page content change that is undesirably cached. Great design also. Quick and efficient.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clear-site-cache/

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  • 2
    Not compatible with Firefox Quantum
    – rluks
    Jun 15, 2018 at 17:54
  • 1
    This extension is no longer available.
    – kmoser
    Jun 8, 2021 at 14:57
  • @kmoser - Considering it wasn't compatible with a version of Firefox from 2018, doesn't surprise me that it is no longer available. Disappointing.
    – user66001
    Jul 8, 2021 at 17:50
1

I had problem with localhost page which I temporarily changed to https with IIS Express cert, and then when I removed https binding Firefox still wanted to open that page with ssl. So the following worked for me:

  1. Click padlock button near site name
  2. Select "Clear cookies and site data" and confirm

After that, site opened in http, and I didn't lose saved passwords

0

While not removing all the site data, this handy addon will remove the cookies for the current site:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/remove-site-cookies

0

If you know the exact list of URLs that you need to clear from the cache (e.g. the corrupted CSS entry/ies from the site in question), you can clear them using this script (adapted from DoomEntry.js; needs to be run on the Browser Console (Ctrl+Shift+J), not the Web Console (Ctrl+Shift+K):

// load the disk cache
var cacheservice = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/netwerk/cache-storage-service;1"]
    .getService(Components.interfaces.nsICacheStorageService);
var {LoadContextInfo} = Components.utils.import("resource://gre/modules/LoadContextInfo.jsm",{})
var hdcache = cacheservice.diskCacheStorage(LoadContextInfo.default, true);

// compose the URL and submit it for dooming
var uri = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/network/io-service;1"]
    .getService(Components.interfaces.nsIIOService).newURI(prompt("Enter the URL to kick out:"), null, null);
hdcache.asyncDoomURI(uri, null, null);

Simply run the script with each URL that you need to purge (or make up a loop... you know the drill).

Theoretically this should clear cached AJAX responses, other asynchronously loaded resources, and 301 redirect entries as well (as long as you enter the original (pre-301) URL).

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  • EDIT: since FF 60, lines 2-3 should be replaced with var hdcache = cacheservice.diskCacheStorage(Services.loadContextInfo.default, true);; kudos to bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1417937. (For some reason I'm not allowed to edit my original answer.) Apr 1, 2018 at 10:47
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Clear Browsing Data is a recommended Firefox extension which enables you to delete browsing data, such as cookies, history and cache, directly from the browser toolbar. The toolbar button can be configured to clear all browsing data with a single click, or to show a list of data types available for clearing.

Supported data types:

Cookies
Browsing history
Cached images and files
Autofill form data
Download history
Service Workers
Plugin data
Saved passwords
IndexedDB data
Local storage data
-1

just open the same page in a firefox "private window" should work to refresh cache for that session and pull new page

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