What is browser cache?

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3 min read

What is browser cache?

Cache (pronounced as cash)

As we are in 21st century This word "cache" is very friendly to us, either we are using smartphone or any similar devices. Most of the times we get a notification to clear the cache and just in one tap our cache gets wiped, however we don't care "What's happening behind ?"

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Actually cache is the hidden memory which is fastest memory present in our devices, and our devices needs to fetch many things from storage again and again and as I said cache is the fastest memory available so instead of retrieving those things from slow memory (Hard or state Drives) again and again our devices stores those things in cache (fastest memory). The process of storing and fetching those files are all done by operating System
This is how Operating system use cache.

Now coming to Browser cache

Whenever we have to visit any website, we just open our browser type the URL and hit enter that's it our webpage get rendered on the screen. Again ! as we are in the arena of "Fifth Generation" very less of you might have observed that, whenever unfortunately if we are having a "low speed internet or a low bandwidth" we often observes that if we had visited the site earlier "regardless of our speed our page gets rendered in very less amount of time" like we are still having a great bandwidth however this is not true whereas in case of first and fresh visit it takes time. So here Browser cache comes into the picture, when we visit any website our browser used to collects the

  • Images - logos, pictures, backgrounds, etc.
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript

    and stores them to our device hard-drive and on the next render instead of going and fetching these things from server it gets from our device itself.

Benefits of Browser Caching are :-

  • Faster delivery of Web objects to the end user.
  • Reduces bandwidth needs and cost. It benefits the user, the service provider and the website owner.
  • Reduces load on the website servers.

Can We Clear or Delete Browser Cache ?

YES We can clear or Delete our Browser cache whenever we want. Why Should we Clear "Browser Cache" ?

Most of the times we get irritated of that ridiculous autofills in the forms available on the web-pages. When we update our application, our browser may still use old files. If you don’t clear our cache, you may see old forms. It may leads to privacy issues as well. This is why we should clear our browser's cache regularly.

How To Clear or Delete Browser Cache ?

Every browser has an option to clear or delete their cache, steps are quite similar in every browser. However the steps mentioned below are for chrome browser.

1. On your computer, open Chrome.
2. At the top right, click More .
3. Click More tools and then Clear browsing data.
4. At the top, choose a time range. To delete everything, select All time.
5. Next to "Cookies and other site data" and "Cached images and files," check the boxes.
6. Click Clear data.

Hope that this blog helped you clearing the cloudy doubts about browser cache .
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