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How do you force reload (not from cache) in Firefox 4.0?

I have seen a lot of supposed theories on the internet, including:

Ctrl + F5

Ctrl + Shift + R

But, in reality, these do not actually work. So how do you really do it?

The only way I seem to be able to do it, is to manually clear the cache each time. This is hardly a solution in a development environment.

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jun 8 '11 at 9:13

5 Answers

I'm on Firefox 8 and Ctrl + F5 definitely is the shortcut to a full page reload.

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This also works for IE and I'm fairly certain Chrome as well. It's a reload bypassing the cache. – UtahJarhead Oct 2 '12 at 19:09

In FireBug, on a Net tab open a menu (small triangle in the tab) and select Disable Browser Cache.

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As far as I know, at least in 3.x series, 2nd or 3rd refresh in a row forces Firefox to retrieve full page content again. I can agree that it seems like it is not always working.

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Go to the url address: about:config. This should load the Firefox config settings in the window for editing. You may see a warning message stating, "This might void your warranty!" that will require you to click through to load the settings. Then find the browser.cache.check_doc_frequency key and change it to 1.


For reference, valid values for browser.cache.check_doc_frequency are:

  • 0 – Check for a new version of a page once per session (a session starts when the first application window opens and ends when the last application window closes).

  • 1 - Check for a new version every time a page is loaded. ← This one

  • 2 – Never check for a new version – always load the page from cache. (offline mode?)

  • 3- Check for a new version when the page is out of date. (Default)

Obviously this will affect your entire browsing experience, but it's this or CTRL + F5 a few times.

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You also could try holding Shift and pressing the reload button. Not sure if it works on Firefox 4.0. By the way, why are you using Firefox 4?

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