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I work with a bunch of windows developers and our app is a web application. I was often told I need to "refresh" my windows, and it seems there are many ways to "refresh", and each has a different function (refresh cache, reload javascript, etc, etc). I was told to:

- press F5 or right click refresh
- Ctrl-F5, Shift-F5, Ctrl+Shift-F5 (no alt-F5 yet ;-)) or
- right click, then shift+refresh, ctrl+refresh, ctrl+shift+refresh

Ok, I am confused! Can someone please shed some light to this? Where can I find a definitive list of meaning for the different F5/refresh combinations. I researched but yield no good answer...

Thanks in advance!

Sorry, I should have mentioned it is for IE9 or 10

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  • CTRL+F5 is the default shortcut to refresh web content in all the major browsers on Windows and/or the contents of an explorer window.
    – Ramhound
    Oct 11, 2013 at 17:13
  • I've never had to do anything more than F5, nothing more complicated than that, but when you're dealing with a custom application that someone built, you'd have to speak with them. If I wanted to I could map the J key to be refresh in an application.
    – user201262
    Oct 11, 2013 at 17:43
  • Thanks everyone! It looks like it is either F5 or Ctrl-F5 for reload or hard reload.
    – spock
    Oct 11, 2013 at 20:34

2 Answers 2

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The answer would depend on the browser being used. And as such, the browser's documentation should shed some light into the keys used.

For Firefox, there is the following post.

  • Navigation:
    • Reload: F5 OR Ctrl + R
    • Reload (override cache): Ctrl + F5 OR Ctrl + Shift + R

According to this site, the main difference between reloading and reloading (overriding cache) (described as hard reload next) are the following:

  • load: no request happens until the cached resource expires
  • reload: the request contains the If-Modified-Since and Cache-Control: max-age=0 headers that allow the server to respond with 304 Not Modified if applicable
  • hard reload: the request contains the Pragma: no-cache and Cache-Control: no-cache headers and will bypass the cache

For IE there's this post. Quoting:

  • Refresh the current webpage: F5
  • Refresh the current webpage, even if the time stamp for the web version and your locally stored version are the same (equals to override cache): Ctrl + F5
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Depends on the browser or application being used.

With web browsers, usually it's F5 for a page refresh of (just) the HTML, and Ctrl+F5 to force a full refresh (CSS, JavaScript, etc. are also re-downloaded, regardless of cache time-stamps).

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