A Firefox Auto-Reload

[Sunite]

A Firefox Auto-Reload

Do you ever watch an item on auction sites, such as WorldStart or Ebay, and wait until it gets down to only minutes left to decide if you want to bid or not? Or how about any Web site in which you tend to hit the Refresh button every couple of minutes so you can see the updated page? After awhile, on auction sites especially, when it gets down to the bid time, it doesn't always refresh all the information you need. Fortunately, Firefox has some great add ons that can help you keep pages fresh and up to date.

One add on, Tab Mix Plus (TMP), is one that enhances the tabbed browsing feature of Firefox. It allows you to undo tabs you may have accidentally closed and it also has a session manager, which can restore Firefox back to a previous state if it ever closes unexpectedly. It also has features I couldn’t live without, namely auto-reload.

Once you've download TMP, make your way to the Options menu, click on the Menu icon at the top and then click on the Main Context Menu tab, as shown below. These options can all be added or removed from the context menu, which comes up when you right click anywhere in the white space of the page. Do not right click over an image, as a different menu will pop up. Make sure the option of “Reload Every” is checked and then click OK.



You will now be able to right click and set the auto-reload rate. Next, click anywhere in the white space of the page and the menu shown below should appear. Notice that now, you should have “Reload Every” as a pull out menu. Move your mouse over it and the menu will be shown. There are some predefined amounts of time already set, which makes it easy to use. First, you’ll want to make sure that Enable is checked (a). Then you can choose the amount of time between reloads. If you want all the tabs in Firefox to reload at that rate, simply click on Enable All Tabs (c). That way, you don’t have to set every tab’s rate.



If you would like to set your own reload rate, simply click on Custom (b) and the menu shown below will appear. This helps if you want to have some tabs reloading an odd number of seconds, as all the presets are multiples of five.



TMP contains many different features that, when played with, allow you to customize Firefox to your liking. If you are only looking for a certain feature, you can always search the Mozilla Firefox add on site for what you want. Have fun!