ElI5 why is the ‘cache’ this all powerful crasher of apps and causer of problems? Why does clearing it fix things?
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Cache refers to storage, often tucked away.
A browser cache is a place for your web browser to store some info, mostly a way to “remember” what web pages “look like”. The purpose of this is so that every time you visit a web page your computer doesn’t need to spend time and resources asking the servers what the page should look like and it can make certain assumptions based off of its (the computer’s) memory (cache).
The reason clearing the cache can help is that sometimes the computer’s memory is wrong. Sometimes the page changed enough that the “assumptions” your computer is making no longer apply, sometimes computers just do weird things. But the point is that clearing the browser cache forces the computer to request all the info and not assume anything. It will then rebuild this cache so that it can go back to working off “memory”. In a way, this is another form of “turn it off and back on again”. Your computer using its own assumptions is intended, and good, but sometimes you need it to forget what it “thought it knew” and start fresh.
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