During site development I will frequently have to remind the client to refresh their browser (F5) to clear their browser cache and see the new version of the site page. Once the site is live and I switch on Couch caching in config.php how does server caching interact with browser caching? If a page's content changes Couch will delete the cached version and serve the new version ... would this somehow override the client's browser cache?
Couch's caching is totally independent of browser's caching.
The browser will never know if it is being served a cached page or a dynamically generated page by the web server.
So the 'refresh using F5' part remains the same whether or not you choose to deploy Couch's caching.
The way Couch's caching works, anytime you hit the 'save' button on any of your pages in the admin-panel, the cache gets invalidated (destroyed in a sense) and all further requests are fulfilled by dynamic generation (of course, with the output getting cached so another request for the same page is handed over the cached output).
Does this answer your query? Please let me know if something is unclear.
Thanks.