Some websites, particularly news portals, live sports trackers, and stock market dashboards, use an aggressive HTML “meta refresh” tag to force your browser to reload the entire web page automatically every few minutes to pull in the latest updates. While this ensures you have the newest data, it can be incredibly jarring if you are halfway down the page reading an article, only to have the screen flash white and yank you back to the very top. If you prefer to reload your pages manually on your own schedule, you can configure Mozilla Firefox to block automatic page refreshes.
How to Stop Automatic Page Reloads
You can block this behavior by modifying an advanced accessibility preference.
- Open the Mozilla Firefox browser.
- Click on the URL address bar.
- Type about:config and press Enter.
- Click the Accept the Risk and Continue button to bypass the warning.
- In the search box at the top of the page, type the following exactly: accessibility.blockautorefresh
- The preference will appear in the list below. You will see its value is set to false.
- Click the Toggle button (the icon with two arrows) on the far right of the row.
- The value will instantly change from false to true.
From now on, whenever a website attempts to execute an automatic refresh, Firefox will intercept the command. Instead of reloading the page, a small notification bar will appear at the top of the screen informing you that Firefox has prevented the page from redirecting, giving you the choice to manually allow it if you wish.