The webcam is new, but the refresh issue is still remaining for at least some users. The HTML coding we have in place at the moment actually does refresh the page and tells the browsers not to cache the page, but unfortunately Chrome and Edge still cache the image and still use it even with the page refresh. Firefox and Safari don’t seem to have the problem. Chromium based browsers, namely Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, handle the caching of images in strange ways. A little digging reveals that this is a well known issue in the developers world. And unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any combination of HTML tags in the header that can fix that. There are more sophisticated fixes, and we will look into them, but they may be beyond our current volunteer capacities.
However, a "hard refresh" still works in most situations, to bypass aggressive caching by various browsers. Here are some tested options from various islanders:
Windows PC
CTRL + F5 should force a full page and cache refresh.
Mac Laptop
Firefox: works fine and picture consistently updates
Safari: works fine and picture consistently updates
Chrome: Pulls the right image on first page load. Then page refreshes every 2 minutes but image doesn’t. In order to force a full page including the image to refresh, the user must press CMD + SHIFT + R, which forces a full page and cache refresh.
Edge: Same behaviour as Chrome.
iMac/iPad
Pat English: Here’s another hard refresh for the iMacs. I have a keyboard on my iPad, so it works with that, too - if you have a keyboard. Option+Command+R. I also found that if you sit on the website for a couple of minutes, it will refresh automatically.
iOS devices (iPhone and iPad)
Sony found that Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Edge all work fine and picture consistently updates with page refresh.
However, different iterations of the same browser can have differences. If you are finding that it doesn't refresh with Safari on iOS, Adam Sandell finds this works:
1. Switch on airplane mode.
2. Refresh the page in Safari (which will fail).
3. Switch off airplane mode.
4. Refresh the page again.
Making it fail at step 2 seems to force a full refresh at step 4.
Android Phones
Veronica: My only experience is with the Samsung Galaxy. On my phone, in the Samsung browser, if I pull down the refresh icon and then hold it down (not just tapping it), it forces a refresh. But on another version of the same phone, this only works if it is using the Firefox browser.
Anyone with fixes that apply to other phones, or improvements on any of the above, please let us know.
Many thanks to Sony Falardeau for most of the above information!
To report continuing problems, or to contribute an additional fix to this page, email us.