
So a boolean parameter is not part of the current specification for location.reload() - and in fact has never been part of any specification for location.reload() ever published. Right-click anywhere on the page and then click 'Inspect' at the bottom of the list: Right-click on the browser refresh symbol at the left of the address bar. And at one point the W3C Web APIs Working Group took up an issue to consider adding it to the specification for location.reload(). The history of it is: some version of Netscape Navigator added support for it, which apparently eventually got picked up in Firefox. Clicking the Refresh arrow on your browser address bar is not a hard refresh. New scripts, styles, and features might be included. To find out how to do this, search the Internet for hard refresh + the name of your browser (e.g.

So there's a lot of existing code which has it. A hard refresh forces your browser to load the most recent version of a website by clearing the cache for that page. Go to and do a hard refresh for the page (this is not the same as the Reload button in your browser). A GitHub " location.reload(true)" search returns several hundred thousand results. You may, though, come across instances of location.reload(true) in existing code that was written with the assumption the force-reload effect occurs in all browsers. However, in all other browsers, any parameter you specify in a location.reload() call will be ignored and have no effect of any kind.


Note: Firefox supports a non-standard forceGet boolean parameter for location.reload(), to tell Firefox to bypass its cache and force-reload the current document.
