A site you access has just been completely changed and there is a great offer on the homepage according to the email in your inbox. Yet, when you hit the site, it just has what was there yesterday?
The culprit is a little ditty known as the cache. You have one and so does the server that the webpages are sitting on.
Your browser has its own local cache of files that are downloaded when you access the page. Your browser looks at the headers of the file you are accessing and sees if anything has changed. If it hasn't changed, it uses the local copy of the file rather then accessing the server version and pulling it down all over again. If you look at your temporary internet files you'll see a copy of all the pages you accessed and therefore downloaded.
The host provider for the website you are accessing may or may not keep an additional server level cache.
The symptom is the same for either cache. A file has been changed on the host and browsers don't show the change. Exasperating when you or your webmaster has uploaded a new file and you don't see the changes. What to do?
The simplest way to update your cache (that's your local browser's cache) is to use Ctrl-F5 or Ctrl-R. Both will clear out your local cache files in either IE or in Firefox.
If that doesn't work, use the method to get the latest version on the server: use a question mark at the end of the url that you are attempting to use. So to get the latest copy of this server file, you would use http://www.agilenavigator.com?. That will force your browser to re-fetch the file from the server and tell the host to send the latest copy, not the cached (unchanged) copy.
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