[Tip] How to Clear Cache and Cookies in Your Web Browser

Whenever you open a website in your web browser (such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera or the new Microsoft Edge browser), the browser automatically creates some cookies to store information. For example, you login to an email website or an online forum, then your login information is stored in a cookie to help you stay logged in. If the browser does not create cookie, you’ll need to login to the website every time you open it. Imagine you login to a forum and click on a few topic links and you need to login again and again on each page. That’s why cookies are created so that you stay logged in on websites.

Cookies are small text files which are created by all web browsers to store user information and preferences. As a rule, cookies makes your web browsing experience better and easier.

But sometimes you may need to clear/delete cookies in your web browser for privacy or safety issues. For example, you used a public computer or someone else computer and now you want to delete all cookies to remove your information and preferences.

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Similar to cookies, the browser also stores website pages into cache (temporary Internet files) to save your Internet connection bandwidth. When you open a website, the images , etc are stored in form of browser cache on your local hard drive so that the browser doesn’t need to download them again you visit that website in future. It also makes the websites loading faster as the browser doesn’t download the images and other files from the server, it shows them from the local cache.

Sometimes you may need to clear the browser cache. For example, a website changed its logo or theme but your browser still showing old logo and theme from its cache. Clearing cache will force browser to load new logo and files.

Today in this tutorial, we’ll tell you how to clear/remove cache and cookies in all popular web browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Microsoft Edge.

NOTE: Remember clearing cookies will log you out from all websites, forums, etc and you’ll need to login again to all websites.

Let’s start the tutorial:

Generally options to clear browsing history are found in Tools or Options/Preferences page in all web browsers but there is a universal keyboard shortcut or hotkey which can be used in all web browsers to launch the “Clear browsing history” dialog box or window directly.

You just need to press Ctrl+Shift+Delete keys together in your web browser and it’ll show the clear browsing history window.

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Now you can select desired items to clean such as cookies, cache (temporary internet files), browsing history, download history, forms and search history, form data, passwords, offline website data, site preferences, etc.

PS: In some browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera, you’ll need to change the time range to “The beginning of time“, “All time” or “Everything” using the drop-down box to erase all cache and cookies stored on your computer.

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After selecting the items, click on Clear, Clear Now, Clear Data, Delete, Clear Browsing Data or similar button. Every browser provides different button to clear the cache, cookies and other items.

Once you click on the button, it’ll remove the cache and cookies and other selected items from your computer.

That’s it. You have successfully deleted cache and cookies from your machine and now you can start surfing again from scratch.

BONUS TIP:

You can also use keyboard shortcut Ctrl+F5 to hard refresh a web page. It’ll force the browser to clear that website from local cache and reload the fresh web page from the server.

Also Check:

[Tip] How to Reset / Restore Your Web Browser Settings to Default Factory State

Published in: Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera

About the author: Vishal Gupta (also known as VG) has been awarded with Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award. He holds Masters degree in Computer Applications (MCA). He has written several tech articles for popular newspapers and magazines and has also appeared in tech shows on various TV channels.

Comments

NOTE: Older comments have been removed to reduce database overhead.

  1. Although i knew about how to clear cache and cookies but didnt know about the hotkey. Thanks for the share.

  2. Appreciate the valuable info in your article. Always follow AskVG on Twitter too….

    Would it be easier to just use the free version of CCleaner to clear unwanted cookies and cache and even save the cookies that you need?

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