MacOS – Does Safari cache old pages

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I have been having this problem probably ever since I bought my iMac. The Safari browser exhibits weird behaviour when I often navigate to a certain webpage. I do a lot of website development so naturally I have to test my sites. However, Safari seems to be keeping the old copy of the website in memory and keeps loading it! The only option is clearing the browsing data but that leads also to me getting logged out of all sites on the device so it's a pain.

An example of what happened today: I had a website that had a <meta> tag redirecting to www.anotherpage.com. I removed that tag and uploaded the file on FTP. However, Safari would still keep redirecting me to that page. When I accessed the same URL from mobile Safari version, everything worked as expected, no redirect. Heck, even Mozilla or Chrome on desktop showed the new site.

Should I just disable caching or am I missing something? Has anyone experienced similar problem? Or is it only one of the reasons why Safari is becoming the new IE?

Best Answer

Safari aggressively caches redirects and force refresh will only force refresh the page you are redirected to, not the redirect itself. You can clear the cache without clearing your browsing data (cookies) by choosing Develop → Empty Caches (⌥⌘E).