What is the easiest way to make your browser refresh a page every say, 5 seconds?

Is there a browser that supports refreshing a page every say, 5 seconds? Is there an add-on?

If not, is there a more simple way than writing a full (C# or Java) program in order to do that?

Added: Opera is horrible! I set Stack Overflow to refresh every 5 seconds, but when I click on a post, it refreshes it every 5 secs too! I just wanted the main page to refresh every 5 seconds.

Another "Added": apparently it refreshes the current tab, so as long as I open the post in a new tab, it works great.

Solution 1:

Yes, Opera supports this feature out of the box. Go to the webpage, right click and select Reload Every.

See the following screenshot for illustration:

reload every in action

You might also be interested in the Check4Change extension for Firefox.

Solution 2:

Or for Firefox, use the following one-liner as a Greasemonkey script:

setTimeout(function(){ window.location.href = window.location.href; }, 5000);

Solution 3:

Opera has a Reload Every option built into it.

If you use Firefox you can download the ReloadEvery addon.

Solution 4:

you can do with /bin/bash and links (or any other command like curl or wget)

while true;                                                                                                                                                 
do
    links http://127.0.0.1:3000 -dump > /dev/null 
    sleep 2
done

if you need to see the html use -source instead of -dump ;-)

Solution 5:

Use the iMacros addon! It is available for IE, Firefox and Chrome.

iMacros is a great (and open source) web browser macro recorder addon, and refreshing a website is dead simple with it. Use this macro:

  VERSION BUILD=7000928 RECORDER=FX
  REFRESH
  WAIT SECONDS=5

and start it with the LOOP button.

If you want to make sure that the page is really completely reloaded (not from cache) use the CLEAR command and reload the complete website via URL GOTO command:

  VERSION BUILD=7000928 RECORDER=FX
  CLEAR
  URL GOTO=http://superuser.com/
  WAIT SECONDS=5

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