How to force IE to reload javascript?

If you are looking to just do this on YOUR browser (a.k.a. not forcing this on your users), then I would NOT set your code to not utilize the cache. As José said, there is a performance loss.

And I wouldn't turn off caching on IE altogether, because you lose that performance gain for every website you visit. You can tell IE to always refresh from the server for a specific site or browsing session:

1. Open IE Developer Tools
2. Choose Cache from the Menu
3. Click to check "Always Refresh From Server"

Or, for the keyboard-shortcut-philes (like myself) out there..

• F12, Alt+C, Down Arrow, Alt+R.

NOTE OF CAUTION : Having said this... Keep in mind that anytime you develop/test in a different way than the site will be viewed in production, you run the risk of getting mixed results. A good example is this caching issue. We found an issue where IE was caching our Ajax calls and not updating results from a GET method. If we HAD disabled caching in IE, we would have never seen this problem in development, and would have deployed it to production like this.

Paolo's general idea (i.e. effectively changing some part of the request uri) is your best bet. However, I'd suggest using a more static value such as a version number that you update when you have changed your script file so that you can still get the performance gains of caching.

So either something like this:

<script src="/my/js/file.js?version=2.1.3" ></script>

or maybe

<script src="/my/js/file.2.1.3.js" ></script>

I prefer the first option because it means you can maintain the one file instead of having to constantly rename it (which for example maintains consistent version history in your source control). Of course either one (as I've described them) would involve updating your include statements each time, so you may want to come up with a dynamic way of doing it, such as replacing a fixed value with a dynamic one every time you deploy (using Ant or whatever).

Add a string at the end of your URL to break the cache. I usually do (with PHP):

<script src="/my/js/file.js?<?=time()?>"></script>

So that it reloads every time while I'm working on it, and then take it off when it goes into production. In reality I abstract this out a little more but the idea remains the same.

If you check out the source of this website, they append the revision number at the end of the URL in a similar fashion to force the changes upon us whenever they update the javascript files.

When you work with web page or javascript file you want it to be reloaded every time you change it. You can change settings in IE 8 so the browser will never cache.

Follow this simple steps.

1. Select Tools-> Internet Options.
2. In General tab click on Settings button in Browsing history section.
3. Click on "Every time I visit the webpage" radio button.
4. Click OK button.