As you can see people have to come up with quirky workarounds to force refresh a folder on OS X, rather than just clicking a context menu button helpfully provided.
Others have created third party software to add it:
Both Windows and OS X fall out of sync for similar reasons: sometimes bugs, sometimes refreshing is slow/expensive so is done infrequently (e.g. over a network), and sometimes third party software providing "virtual" file system elements are terrible.
I don't really find the concept of a refresh button odd at all. But that's only because I've seen how many virtual file system providers these systems support and how quirky some of them are. If all they supported is native files on traditional file systems attached via reliable buses, then a refresh button wouldn't be required.
Huh, none of these show the workaround I've always used: create a new folder and delete it. That's been my "pseudo-refresh" for years, because it's relatively quick to type command-shift-n, command-delete.
Two other things that cause Finder to show stale data:
- change the icns file inside an app
- enable 'calculate all sizes', then delete a file in a subdirectory
There's no easy way to refresh due to the various levels of caching involved. Closing and reopening windows doesn't help. In the icns case, not even killing Finder helps. So I assume that even if Apple wasn't fundamentally opposed to a refresh button in the UI, it would be non-trivial to implement the back button.
http://osxdaily.com/2013/08/30/refreshing-finder-windows-in-...
http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/60119/how-does-the-...
As you can see people have to come up with quirky workarounds to force refresh a folder on OS X, rather than just clicking a context menu button helpfully provided.
Others have created third party software to add it:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24714/refresh-finder
This has 46,000 downloads.
Both Windows and OS X fall out of sync for similar reasons: sometimes bugs, sometimes refreshing is slow/expensive so is done infrequently (e.g. over a network), and sometimes third party software providing "virtual" file system elements are terrible.
I don't really find the concept of a refresh button odd at all. But that's only because I've seen how many virtual file system providers these systems support and how quirky some of them are. If all they supported is native files on traditional file systems attached via reliable buses, then a refresh button wouldn't be required.