How can I force a hard reload in Chrome for Android

Question

In Chrome for desktop I have options in the dev tools to disable cache completely when dev tools are opened and I have the options to manually do a hard reload when long clicking on the reload button  with dev tools open    Is there any such technique for Chrome for Android  I didn t find any setting  What can I do when I want to force the browser to download some javascript or css file instead of using a cached one when developing

User · Answer

Adding a parameter to url fool browser to load a new page. I wrote a fuction for that purpose:

function forceReload(){
    
    function setUrlParams(url, key, value) {
        url = url.split('?');
        usp = new URLSearchParams(url[1]);
        usp.set(key, value);
        url[1] = usp.toString();
        return url.join('?');
    }
    
    window.location.href =setUrlParams(window.location.href,'_t',Date.now());
}

And you just need to call it:

forceReload();

User · Answer

Mentioning this because you mentioned  when developing    You can control the mobile device via your Chrome Desktop Browser   Visit chrome   inspect  devices on your desktop  And Inspect the device that s connected to your desktop  Agree when asked for permission   You should now see a full fledged Devtool window for the current page on mobile device   Now  Use the hard reload shortcut  Cmd Shift R  on desktop to do hard reload on mobile device

User · Answer

Here is another simple solution that may work when others fail   Today  a fairly simple developer-side solution worked for me when the caching problem was a cached CSS file  In short  Create a temporary html file copy and browse to it to update the CSS cache   This trick can refresh the CSS file  at least in Android s blue-globe-iconed default browser  but quite likely its twin  the official Chrome browser  too  and whatever other browsers we encounter on  smart phones with their trend of aggressive caching    Details   At first I tried some of the fairly simple solutions shared here  but without success  for example clearing the recent history of the specific site  but not months and months of it   My latest CSS would however not be applied apon refresh  And that even though I had already employed the version-number-trick in the CSS file-call in the head section of the html which had helped me avoid these pesky aggressive cachings in the past   example  link rel  stylesheet  href  style css v 001  where you upgrade this pseudo-version number every time you make a change to a CSS file  e g  001  002  003  004     should be done in every html file of the site    This time  August 2019  the CSS file version number update no longer sufficed  nor did some of the simpler measures mentioned here work for me  or I couldn t even find access to some of them  on a borrowed android phone    In the end I tried something relatively simple that finally solved the problem   I made a copy of the site s index html file giving it a different name  indexcopy html   uploaded it  browsed to it on the Android device  then browsed back to the original page  refreshed it  with the refresh button left of the address bar   and voil    This time the refresh of index html finally worked   Explanation  The latest CSS file version was now finally applied on Android when refreshing the html page in question because the cached copy of the CSS file had now been updated when the CSS file was called from a differently named temporary html page that did not exist anywhere in the browser history and that I could delete again afterwards  The aggressive caching apparently ignored the CSS URL and went instead by the HTML URL  even though it was the CSS file that needed to be updated in the cache

User · Answer

Keyboard shortcuts such as Ctrl Shift R work on Android too  you just need a keyboard capable of sending these keys  I used Hacker s Keyboard to send Ctrl Shift R  which did a hard reload on my phone

User · Answer

I found a solution that works  but it s ugly    Connect the Android device to your PC with a USB cable and open Chrome on your desktop  Right-click anywhere on a page and select  Inspect   Click the three-dot menu and select  Remote devices  under the  More tools  menu    In the panel that opens  select your device and then the  Inspect  button next to the name of the tab on your phone that needs to be refreshed    In the window that opens  click the  Network  tab and check the  Disable cache  checkbox    Reload the page on your phone or using the reload button in the DevTools window       Note  if your phone doesn t appear in the device list          make sure the USB connection is using File Transfer mode and isn t simply charging   try restarting ADB or run adb devices to see if the device is being detected

User · Answer

I ve struggled with this for a CSS file that wouldn t refresh  But you can type the name of the CSS file itself into the address bar and refresh that  After that it s fine  Chrome on Android 8  Obviously that would be tiresome if you had more than a couple of files involved

User · Answer

Don t forget to make sure that the  Reduce data usage  setting is turned OFF  as it seems to download cached data  from Google servers   even though your local cache is flushed

User · Answer

The only reliable way I ve found that doesn t require plugging the phone in to a PC is as follows   1  Force stop the Chrome app    This must be done first  and you cannot re-open Chrome until you finish these steps  There are several ways to force stop  Most home launchers will let you get to  App info  by holding down your finger on the chrome icon and selecting an  i  icon  Alternately  you may be able to go to Android settings and simply search for  Chrome      Once in  App info   select  Force stop  as shown below       2  Clear Chrome s cache    Select  Storage  from the same screen         Finally  select  Clear cache        When you return to the Chrome app  the page should reload itself and serve a non-cached version    Additionally  I found a site that makes it easy to test if you ve cleared your cache  https   refreshyourcache com en cache-test  I am in no way affiliated with it  Note that the method to clear the cache mentioned on that site is in fact outdated and no longer valid

User · Answer

Also an option    Menu  Settings Privacy  Clear Browsing Data Check  Cache  and press  CLEAR    and then reload the page

User · Answer

I m using window location reload true  according to MDN  and this similar question  it forces page to reload from server   You can execute this code in the browser by typing javascript location reload true  in the address bar

User · Answer

Remote Debugging allows you to use the desktop dev-tools   https   developers google com chrome-developer-tools docs remote-debugging

User · Answer

In chrome simply tick  quot Desktop site quot  and then remove tick

User · Answer

As of 2018  from google help center  tested on Chrome 63      tap on the three dots menu   choose History   Clear browsing data   if needed  choose the time period  above the checklist    uncheck all items but Cached images and files   proceed with Clear data and confirm    As mentioned in another answer  incognito tabs are also of great use for development

User · Answer

If its just the matter of included files  just add version after the path   v 12345678    lt link rel  stylesheet  type  text css  href  style css v 12345678    gt    Whoever loads the page again will see changes

User · Answer

Recent versions of Chrome cache very aggressively  Even cache-busting techniques such as  http   url updated datecode  stopped working  You must clear the cache or launch an incognito window every time  and make sure data-saver is off

User · Answer

I know this is an old question  but I found that the accepted answer didn t work for me   An alternate solution would be to append the url with a new url parameter such as website com a 1  website com a 2  etc   If you have parameters already  of course  you would use an ampersand i e  website com q test amp a 1

User · Answer

Viewing the page in incognito mode will disable the cache  It was the only way I could force a refresh on a stylesheet without manually clearing the cache through the settings

User · Answer

EDIT  This method has been deprecated in Google Chrome and will no longer work   ORIGINAL ANSWER   I was able to clear the cache  including subsequent xhr  using chrome   net-internals    Then click the little arrow in the top right    Select  clear cache  from that menu

User · Answer

Launch the Chrome Android app   Open any offline website or webpage that you need to hard refresh   Tap on  icon options in the Chrome browser   Tap on  the icon to hard refresh the website page in Chrome

User · Answer

How to reset all data for a given URL   Website on Chrome Mobile for android   1 - Open the Chrome menu  and tap on the  i  info   icon    2 - tap  Site settings     3 - Tap the trashcan icon    That s it  even the most deeply ensconsed service worker for that URL will now die

User · Answer

Most of the answers were not working for me  Here is a super simple working on my Galaxy S8 in august 2020  Add  quot view-source  quot  just before your http      address  navigate trough there to the changed file if different than the html or index  You will see the unchanged file  Refresh  Done

User · Answer

You can use the Request Desktop Site option from the app menu  to the right of the address bar  which will force the page to reload    Simply tap it  wait for the refresh  then deselect it

[google-chrome] How can I force a hard reload in Chrome for Android

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