Overview
The Firefox web browser routinely saves components of websites to your local machine. This is intended to speed up web browsing by preventing websites from reloading common resources (like banners and icons) every time a page is loaded, but sometimes this can cause a website to function incorrectly because it's storing outdated content. The reset process described in this article can resolve these issues by removing those "cached" items, prompting your browser to download the most recent content from websites.
Before you begin...
Save your work and close all applications, as this process will require you to restart your computer.
Instructions
- Open the Firefox browser.
- Click on the menu button (three horizontal lines).
- Click on Settings (for older versions: on PC click Options, if using a Mac click Preferences).
- Click on Privacy & Security in the side menu.
- Under the History heading, click the Clear History button.
- Select Everything for the "Time range to clear" option.
- Check all of the following check boxes:
- Browsing & Download History (not always required, but highly recommended if issues persist with websites)
- Active Logins
- Form and Search history
- Cookies
- Cache
- Site Preferences
- Offline Website Data
- Click the Ok button to continue.
- Note: This process may take some time, depending on how much cached content is currently stored on the machine.
- Once the process finishes, close the browser window.
- Restart your computer.
Result
Your web browser should now be reset. You should open the website that was experiencing issues.