How to Clear Your Browser’s Cache, and Why You Should

How to Clear Your Browser’s Cache, and Why You Should

Though I love that I get to write about the tech industry every day, it’s touched by gender, racial, and socioeconomic inequality and I try to bring these topics to light. Websites aim to load up quickly because users don’t have the patience to wait while they load. According to Website Builder Expert, websites should i delete cookies that load within two seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, while those that load within five seconds have a bounce rate of 38%. Portions of this content are ©1998–2024 by individual mozilla.org contributors. Incidentally, the term “external hard drive” generally refers to portable storage devices.

How to clear your cookies in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari or Opera

If a website has the same images and banners on different pages, this allows you to open the pages faster. The cache also allows you to view the website if you’re offline. Check out our guides to the best phones, best laptops, best cameras, best televisions, and best tablets and eReaders.

Managing cookies on iOS

I want comments to be valuable for everyone, including those who come later and take the time to read. Here are some answers to common questions we’ve been asked about clearing your web browser’s cache. If anything isn’t covered, please send us a message and we’d be happy to explain further.

Contents

You can also click the Advanced tab for additional features like clearing your download history, passwords, other sign-in data, autofill form data, site settings, and hosted app data. Over on Firefox for the desktop, click the menu button (three horizontal lines, top right), then choose Settings. The options you need can be found on the Privacy & Security tab by clicking on Clear Data.

Apple Safari

And if you want to learn about the next big thing, see our guide to everything we know about the iPhone 15. Note that if you play Flash games or use other Flash applications, you might lose saved data. Right now there is only one cookie management tool in Safari on iOS, and that’s to block all cookie storage outright. If you’re having PC memory issues, you might assume clearing your RAM’s cache might sound like it’ll make your PC run faster. But be careful, because it can actually slow it down and is unlikely to fix whatever problem you’re facing.

How to clear cookies and cache in every browser

Follow our easy to read guide (with screenshots!) to clear your web browser cache. I’ve been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally for over 30 years, more than half of that time with PCMag. I work from my home, and did it long before pandemics made it cool. A tech-inspired writer and content manager with a wide experience in IT and genuine admiration for Apple products. Clario’s VPN is a cybersecurity tool that protects your data and privacy and allows you to browse the internet anonymously. It does this by masking your real IP address so that hackers can’t trace you.

• For instance, you might use Microsoft Word and wish to edit the PDF.
• To learn more about managing site data in Firefox, see Manage local site storage settings and Enhanced Cookie Clearing.
• CCleaner offers a Pro version of its software for just $30 a year.
• Here, we’ll walk you through a few of the ways you can convert PDFs to Word documents.
• This type of tracking can also be used to perhaps prevent people whose online behavior appears to be similar to that of men from being shown advertisements designed for women.

It’s a good idea, and it works well most of the time, which is why every browser does it. Browsers will try to ensure this doesn’t happen, but it can, and that might mean you’re looking at information, links, and images that are no longer accurate or relevant. In the past, users would have to install a third-party extension like Better Privacy to prevent LSOs from being saved on their systems. Today, however, all major browsers prevent Flash applications from loading unless you explicitly tell them to do so. They don’t track at the individual level, but they use the data en masse to do things like provide more highly targeted and interesting ads or perform market research. This type of tracking can also be used to perhaps prevent people whose online behavior appears to be similar to that of men from being shown advertisements designed for women.

It’s a list of all the websites you’ve visited in your browser. Clicking on a website in your internet history loads it directly. Clearing your browser history won’t remove your cache history and vice versa. Onyx is a fantastic system clean-up tool made exclusively for macOS products. It’s free to download and doesn’t take long to get up and running. When you open the app, you’ll see tabs for Maintenance, Utilities, Files, Security, and a few other options.