I’m an ASP.NET developer, and I usually find myself leaving the webpage that I’m working on open in my browser (Chrome is my browser of choice, but this question is relevant for any browser). My workflow typically goes like this: I write code, I rebuild my project in Visual Studio, and then I flip back to my browser with Alt-Tab and hit F5 to refresh the page.
This is fine and dandy if a form hasn’t been submitted since the page was opened. But if I’ve been clicking around on ASP.NET form controls, the page has posted form data a number of times, so hitting F5 causes the browser to (sensibly) pop up a confirmation message, e.g., “Confirm Form Resubmission: The page that you’re looking for used information that you entered…”.
Sometimes I do want to resubmit the form, but more often than not, I just want to start over with the page (rather than resubmit form data). The way I usually get around this is to simply add some query string data to the URL so that the browser sees it as a fresh page request, e.g.:
page.aspx
becomes
page.aspx?
(or vice-versa).
My question is: Is there a better way to quickly request a fresh version of a webpage (and not submit form data) in any of the major browsers? It seems like a no-brainer to me for web development, but maybe I’m missing something. What I’d love to see is something like the last item in this list:
- F5: refresh page
- Ctrl-F5: refresh page (and force cache refresh)
- Alt-F5: request fresh copy of the page without resubmitting the form
Go to the address bar and press Enter to submit a fresh GET request. Quick keyboard shortcut is Alt+D, Enter.