Yakov Fain

Any Web browser has local cache, and everyone knows that its goal is to minimize the number of network requests by caching locally some resources like images or even the program code.

The google.com home page opens blazing fast? Sure, because the browser loads it from your disk cache, not from the network.



But let me question this holy grail of all Web browsers. Does local cache make your Internet browsing faster? I have two different ISP at this location. Take a look at the speed of my Verizon FIOS wireless internet connection produced by speedtest.net.

Optimum Online is my second ISP and below is their data. Both ISP show pretty respectable speed, aren’t they?

Now back to local cache. Being a Web developer, I use several Web browsers to make sure that my JavaScript (a.k.a. HTML 5) applications look good on four major browsers. A regular person may not know a little dirty secret of Web developers – they often turn off the cache to make sure that the Web browser will always pick a fresh version of the application being worked on.

Recently, I started using Google Chrome for personal Web browsing. It’s a nice browser, but I noticed that some Web sites started loading really slow. Cleaning cache often helped. So I decided to make a more radical move – I simply disabled cache once and forever. Man, my Chrome started flying!

If you want to try this experiment too, here’s how to do it. Click on the image of a little wrench at the top right corner of the browser’s window, and select Tools | Developer tools. The bottom portion of your window will show the panel depicting the guts of the Web page you’ve been looking at. Then click on the little round Settings icon at the right bottom corner of the page. It’ll open a new panel, where you can easily find the Disable cache option. Just do it and let me know if you’ve noticed the difference. The same trick should work with other Web browsers too – just google on how to disable cache in yours.