Introduction
Web browser software downloads a copy of every web page you visit and stores these copies to make displaying web pages faster and more efficient. Unless you indicate otherwise, the saved copies of pages remain on your computer for an indefinite period. This is your browser cache. Your web browser may also store other information such as cookies, form responses, preferences, and the history of pages visited.
If you access secure data such as your department's budget information via the web you are, in effect, storing sensitive information on your local computer because of the cached web pages stored by your web browser software.
To ensure that you don't inadvertently store sensitive information locally you can empty or clear your browser's cache after each online session. You can do this manually each time or with some web browsers save this option as a preference to always clear the cache on closing the program. Also, sometimes you may wish to clear your browser cache manually, to get updated page content or to resolve a problem.
Below please find instructions for clearing your browser cache manually and, where possible, setting a preference to clear the cache on closing the browser.