Chrome, Safari Do Not Feature a Hard Refresh

WebKit FTW? Then add the “hard refresh” or “force reload.”

One of the biggest features keeping Chrome from being the browser of choice for developers, is that you cannot perform a “hard refresh” or a “force reload” of the entire page like you can in Firefox. WebKit is fantastic for many things, but this shortcoming needs to be remedied!

On Mac, you press [Cmd + R] to refresh. And Firefox has the extra ability to force a refresh all the page resources (regardless of any Keep-Alive, Last Modified or TTL headers) by pressing [Cmd + Shift + R].

I’d like to clarify that it’s not a “make Chrome smarter issue,” it’s a basic UI “make Chrome more usable” issue. And it has roots way back in WebKit. Frankly, this lack of instant updates is why I’ve never been able to rely on WebKit for web development.


One pithy comment on “Chrome, Safari Do Not Feature a Hard Refresh”

  1. Joe says:

    Sounds like hitting reload twice quickly will work around this, and there’s a fix coming:
    http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1906

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