My desktop office computer - which I rarely use - has somehow gotten “stuck” on the CNN homepage for October 3. It shows the headlines for the first Obama/Romney debate. I have only used it a few times in a rush, but today I tried to fix it. Restarted the computer - no change. Cleared my history/cache and even did the “File Cleanup” for Windows 7 - no change.
It’s my default homepage, but even when I manually type in the CNN URL - it goes to that page.
What caused this, and how do I fix it?
I’m guessing it’s the default homepage setting that’s messed up. Manually edit it to just “http://www.cnn.com/” with nothing after that.
Clear your web cache. IE and Firefox have options to do it. Or better yet, download and use ccleaner. Ccleaner is free and works a lot better than the cache clear in IE.
A full cache will often make web browsers act screwy.
Well, now I feel silly. I just went to check again and I had not actually started the file cleanup. After running that, the homepage is current. Still curious about what caused it, though. Anyhoo, problem solved - thanks!
Do you hear “I Got You Babe” playing on the radio?
All web browsers cache web pages. The first time you visit a site the browser pulls down the current page and caches it. Go back to the same page five minutes later and the browser checks to see if it has a cached version, and the code does not require it to update from the original owner. If so, you see the same page stored on your machine. Some browsers are better at checking the live site better than others, just as some site operators have code to force a refresh at periodic internals.
Some local ISPs used to offer a “high speed” service by caching many favorite sites locally on your behalf. The ISP would claim a faster service than another when in reality users were merely going to cached pages held on local servers owned by the ISP. So no matter how often you visited CNN, for example, during the day, your ISP was only sending you a cached version, perhaps only updated two-three times a day.
Back to your original concern. If you use a <CTRL>-F5 key combination on a Windows machine, your browser will do a deep refresh of the web page, clear the browser cache, fetch the latest update from the site and present it to you.