Anything unknowingly stored on HD?

[Orbi]

Hi,

Perhaps I have a stupid question, but I have only had my iMac for about a month now and I'm learning more each day..

I was wondering... when I watch online video's like news broadcasts and all that, do those video clips store themselves on my Mac somewhere?
You see, when I still had my PC, I used to watch the news online. (from my home country, as I live in another country)
After I was done, I had to run Easy Cleaner to clean up all the gigabites of video's that stored themselves on my PC in some unknown directory!! Naturally, it slowed down my PC considerably!

How does that work with Mac? Do I have to worry about my Mac slowing down because of old video's (or anything else for that matter)
Do I need some kind of cleaning program?

Thanks in advance for your time!

Ex-PC user who's happy she switched to Mac. ;)

[John A]

>when I watch online video's like news broadcasts and all that,
>do those video clips store themselves on my Mac somewhere?
Only temporarily -- depending on your browser, it will store the clips in its cache for future reference, but once that cache reaches its maximum size, then the browser begins to delete the older items.

At default, the browser's cache is usually around 50 MB, nothing that would normally slow your Mac down. However, there are some rare scenarios where the cache does indeed slow down the computer, and in these cases you must manually clear it (in almost every browser there's an option that will allow you to do this).

[Orbi]

Thanks a lot. Yes, Safari has the Empty Cache option. I'm glad I don't have to waste time running all kinds of cleaning programs! :)