Applies To
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Basic Troubleshooting of problems in Outreach.
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Pages not loading, content appearing malformed, etc.
Answer
As an initial troubleshooting step, it is often recommended that users attempt the functionality they're having trouble with from within an Incognito mode. Sometimes, subsequently, they are asked to clear their browser's cache and cookies/site data for all time. Sometimes it helps, others it doesn't. So why do we do this, and when is it actually helpful?
To answer this question, it's important to understand what cache and cookies are, and what purpose they serve:
Cookies are bits of information that websites store regarding current and past browsing sessions. Cookies can contain anything from post-login authorization, to what settings you have configured on a specific website, and more.
The browser cache is the locally-stored copy of various elements on webpages, such as images, styling, and contents. These are stored by your browser in order to help pages load faster on subsequent visits.
Occasionally, when a website undergoes updates, the stored version in cache doesn't align to what the server is expecting. Cache is designed to periodically expire and be re-downloaded, but sometimes those changes make a big impact before that happens. In these circumstances, clearing cache forces a re-download of everything.
Cookies, on the other hand, are most often impacted by specific session changes. For example: Say you are logged into a website, and you change your password to that website. The act of changing your password may not automatically log you out, and your browser will have a cookie set with your old password that shows as an active session, but attempts to authenticate a new service using that cookie will fail, because it was set using the old password. In cases like this, clearing cookies, which will force you to log back in to the site in question, would be helpful.
Incognito mode, on the other hand, sets up a new browsing session that completely ignores existing cache and cookies, and the cache and cookies from the Incognito session are automatically cleared when the session closes. This is useful for testing whether clearing cache and cookies will actually help a given problem. Because clearing cookies will log you out of all websites you're logged into, this is generally recommended as a preliminary test.