Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Safari’s “Reload Page From Origin”

Jeff Johnson (tweet):

It turns out that “Reload Page” does not actually reload the page in the way you expect. I’m not sure exactly what “Reload Page” does, but it still seems to rely on the disk cache. If you hold down the option key, you see “Reload Page” replaced in the menu by “Reload Page From Origin”, which is the reload you expect, the one that ignores the disk cache and loads everything again from the web.

I’m not sure how to do this in iOS. I thought may be a long-press would give me options, but it doesn’t.

I wish that Safari would take a cue from Firefox and Google Chrome in allowing fine-grained control over cookies. Safari has per-site preferences for Auto-Play, Downloads, Notifications, etc., but it doesn’t have per-site preferences for cookies. Compare with Firefox and Google Chrome shown below. The best feature they have is to clear cookies when you quit the app, a feature I wish that Safari would adopt too.

See also: Melissa Holt.

3 Comments RSS · Twitter

Note that option clicking the reload button in the address field does not do a Reload Page From Origin (at least as far as I could tell). You have to actually hold the option key down and select Reload Page From Origin (presumably Command-Option-R works too). But option clicking the reload button does not do it.

Shift-click on the reload button reloads everything. As far as I can remember, the reload (reload page) and shift-reload (reload dependencies also) behaviour has been the same in every widely used browser since the nineties. If the page is implemented in a sane way, dependencies are named uniquely, and thus only a normal reload is necessary.

Don't forget to Cmd + Opt + E before Cmd + Opt + R to clear the caches first juuust in case.

Leave a Comment