How to Refresh Your Browser
Browsers are apps or computer programs that give you access to the World Wide Web, including the RC web site at www.rc.org. There are many flavors of browsers and not all these browsers support all of the functions defined by the standards comity for the World Wide Web: W3C.
Many browsers support enough of the standards to visit our site. To use the tools in the Backoffice more is required and several browsers fail to fulfill the requirements of W3C.
In the end we only support Firefox and Chrome. Opera and Internet Explorer will mostly work. And Safari often breaks with new updates, we recommend to avoid it for using the backoffice.
Some parts of the website are cached by your browser. A common technique to safe on bandwidth and to make pages load faster. Also the site is constantly under development, which is unavoidable these days. Sometimes the cache is not refreshed in time and some part of the website may fail. This also happens when we solve a bug in the web site coding, we cannot always force the browser to reload everything. A refresh of your browser before turning to us for support may prevent lots of work.
How to refresh
While we do not always know what device and browser you use, support people may ask you to refresh your browser. The ways to do this are different in different platforms:
Browser Refresh:
- Windows: ctrl + F5
- Mac/Apple: Apple + R or command + R
- Linux: F5 (in Firefox), shift + F5 (in Chrome)
- Tablets/smartphones: you need to search the menu for the settings.
Network caches (or proxies)
Then sometimes this is even not enough. Some networks, providers, companies use proxies to speed networks and to safe on bandwidth. Proxies also cache elements of web sites. If you do not have access to the administrator of the network, you may have to wait or switch to another connection/location. If you have access to the network administrator, kindly ask to make an exception in their proxy for www.rc.org (only needed if you are a RC backoffice user).
Expert information about caching
Different parts of the web site use different caching settings. When trying to understand why sometimes the 'newest' information from the website is not presented (and a Refresh most often will fix that) it is useful to know the timing on the cache for documents and pictures and artifacts.
File extensions are used to determine caching time:
- pdf|ods|odt|xls|xlsx|doc|docx|rtf|ppt|pptx are cached for 1 hour
- jpg|jpeg|png|gif|svg|pdf|mp3|mp4|webm are cached for 1 year
- code files js|css are cached for a month