Interactive Mathematics by Kunio Mitsuma, Ph.D.

Yours Truly answers: This could happen if the author of the web page has changed its address (called URL=universal resource locator) for maintenance reasons. He must have changed the link to this new URL on other web pages as well, but your browser has not yet updated the link internally.

Let’s say that you are viewing Web Page 1, on which there is a link to Web Page 2. The author has changed the URL of Web Page 2 and updated the link on Web Page 1 that points to Web Page 2.

There are two things you can do that force your browser to update the information it stores on your computer.

(1)

Reload Web Page 1
In many browsers, there is a button in the top tool bar for reloading the page you are viewing. It may look like one of these buttons:

Browser	Reload Button	OS
Firefox		Mac or PC
Safari		Mac

Click on it to refresh/reload the page. Then, click on the link for Web Page 2. Does the link now work? If not, try (2) below.

(2)

Clear the caches kept by the browser
As you visit various web pages, copies of these pages are kept on your computer by the browser. These copies are called caches. Next time you visit the same web page, the browser will first try to fetch the page from its cache. This speeds up the time for the page to show up on the screen. A drawback is that, if something has changed on the page, you may not be viewing the updated page but rather the old page. In this situation, you need to manually clear the caches.

Below is an example of how to clear caches in Firefox.

Step 1	Open the Preferences.
Step 2	Choose Privacy.
Step 3	Choose Cache, click on clear, and OK.

Precisely speaking, there are different types of caches. Here, we discussed what is known as browser caches.