AS ICT and A2 ICT Cache Explained

A "cache" means a temporary store of something. A squirrel keeps a 'cache' of acorns to bide it over the winter months. (It is pronounced as "cash".)

Just so, for Internet Browsers - instead of acorns, the browser will store files - often thousands of them. Why is this a handy thing to do?

Well, a web page is made up of a number of individual files. These include the images being viewed, the text, graphics, sounds, videos, flash movies and so on.

Every one of those files has to be downloaded before it can be used to build up the web page being viewed in the browser. This takes time.

And if you visit the web page again, then all those files would have to be downloaded once more. This can really slow down your browsing.

So the solution, is to store those files in a temporary area on your hard disk, then the browser, on visiting a web page will first of all check this temporary area to see if the web page files have already been downloaded from a previous visit. If so, they are used instead of calling them down once again from the web site.

You will often notice that the first time you visit a web page, it may take a long time to load, but the next time you view the page, it is far quicker. This is because of the Internet Browser cache contains some of the files needed to build up the page.

As you can imagine, over time, the cache will fill up and so you can set a limit on how big the cache can grow before the browser starts to delete the older files.

In Internet Explorer:

To get to this dialogue box use the menu Tools -> Options -> Settings

It is a good idea to clear the cache every now and then, because as more and more files get stored, it takes longer for the browser to search the cache - once again slowing down your browsing.

It is also a good idea not to make the cache too large for the same reason - the larger the cache, the longer it will take to search.

Advantage of having an Internet Browser cache:

It can greatly speed up your browsing experience.

Disadvantage of having an Internet cache:

The browser may not be showing the latest version of the web page - instead you may only be seeing the cached copy of the page. If you suspect this is the case with Internet Explorer, press F5 to force it to refresh the page from the web site.

Microsoft note about cache:

How Internet Explorer Cache Settings Affect Web Browsing