Every now and again I’ll work with a computer user that complains about the information they’re seeing on the web not being up-to-date. The problem is with settings in Internet Explorer to decide whether it should try and help you out with downloading new content.
Before the web got all Web 2.0 on us, web pages didn’t update very frequently. Connection speeds weren’t what they are these days and it actually could take awhile for that page you’re looking at to load into your browser.
When your browser downloads a webpage it saves all the individual files that make-up the webpage in it’s temporary Internet files cache. The next time you visited the page, if it didn’t think anything had changed, it would load the files from the cache instead of downloading all the files again.
For the last 5-10 years I’ve been using the web, I haven’t had to worry about my download speeds being an issue, and have just changed my Internet Options in IE to reflect that desire. Just follow these steps:
- Go to Tools > Internet Options
- On the General tab, look for “Browsing history” and select the “Settings” button
- Under “Check for newer versions…” be sure and select the option for “Every time I visit the webpage”
- Click “OK”
That’s it! You’re all set. Every time you hit a website it will always check for and download the newest files to your browser for you to see and read.