Cache in Web Browsing!
There are many traditional definitions related to different grouping systems. Cache is name of many cities and geo locations worldwide especially in USA and Italy. Then there comes the names of different movies and albums too which are named or include word cache. Also it is used in many domains of computing such as CPU Cache, Disk Buffer, Page Cache, DNS Cache, P2P Cache, Database Caching and Intersystems Cache.
The Cache about which we are interested in knowing here is in the context of web browsing.
So what is Web Cache?
Web Cache: Various web browsers such as IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc. have a unique storage feature (e.g. ‘History’ folder is one of its store units) of hoarding or pinning a specific set of data such as URLs (HTTP) and images (favicon) on the basis of what is most frequently used by a particular computing machine (utlimately the user sitting in front of it) such as desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet. This unique feature is called as Web Cache. It helps in reducing the response time, improves the user experience thus satisfaction.
Cache Hit: When web data related to user query term is found in and served from a cache, it is called as Cache Hit.
Cache Miss: Otherwise case of Cache Hit is called as Cache Miss. In this case data is served by sources other than cache store.
Differences between Cookie and Cache: If to talk in standard terms it is User Information Storage (Cookie) versus System Information Storage (Cache). Cookies store web analytics data related to user behaviour visit and activities on web. Visits data such as frequency, date and time of sessions, visits, views etc. Activity data such as clicks on URL thumbnails, images, videos, ads etc.; rating of a particular content like likes, comments, rating etc.; and conversions such as online purchasing, shopping cart details etc. Whereas Cache is meant for storing the web documents such as HTML pages and images (favicon) as described above. Cookies are short-lived while cache needs to be cleaned manually.