It’s nice to have an auto-reload/refresh feature in your browser, particularly for sites that have their content change often (or even your webmail if it has issues auto-updating itself).
Here are 3 ways to do it:
Mozilla Firefox
Add-on: ReloadEvery
After installation of this add-on, right-click any loaded web page, choose Reload Every from the context menu and enable it. A nice feature is the ability to enable ReloadEvery for all open tabs.
Google Chrome
Extension: Auto-Reload
After installation of this extension, you can auto-refresh pages by clicking the blue icon at the far right of the address bar. On click it turns to green, indicating the current tab will be auto-reloaded. You can set how often reload occurs by going to Extensions then clicking Options for this extension. The default time-until-reload is 60 seconds.
Opera
Opera has an auto-reload feature directly built-in to the browser. Simply right-click any loaded web page, choose Reload Every, choose the auto-reload time and that’s it.
A few important notes on auto-reloading multiple tabs with the above browsers
The most important thing to remember when using auto-reloading for multiple tabs is that this can cause the browser to eat up a lot of memory in a short period of time (even for Chrome).
When auto-reloading multiple tabs, watch your memory usage closely and try not to reload more than 5 open tabs at a time. If for example you open up 20 tabs and auto-refresh them all every 30 seconds, in the beginning your browser will operate normally. But after a short period of time (around 20 to 30 minutes) you’ll see a major OS slowdown. It doesn’t matter how fast your PC is or how much RAM you have. When a browser is eating up a ton of system resource from having 20 tabs reloaded every 30 seconds, expect performance problems. Use a maximum of 5 tabs on the other hand and you’ll be in good shape.
For those of you running Linux, the above applies to you as well. Linux may have wonderful threading and will probably be able to "survive" longer than Windows 7 with 20 open tabs auto-reloading, but eventually you will end up with the same problem and have to force-quit the browser. This is not Linux’s fault but rather the browser’s fault.
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