Auto-refresh vs watching a page for changes in Chrome

You're waiting for something on a web page: a ticket to come back in stock, an order status to move, a new message in a queue, a result to be posted. So you reload. And reload again.

Auto-refresh does the reloading for you. But reloading was never the goal. Noticing the change is. These are two different jobs, and it helps to know which one you have.

When auto-refresh is enough

Plain auto-refresh fits when the page is on a screen you're already looking at:

• a dashboard on a second monitor;
• a live score, a status board, or a queue you're working through;
• a page that logs you out or goes stale if it isn't reloaded.

Chrome has no built-in setting for it. You can install a general auto-refresh extension, or add a small tool to the one page you need, which reloads it on a timer, shows a countdown and has a pause button. We walk through both in How to auto-refresh a page in Chrome.

When you need to know what changed

Auto-refresh falls short when you're doing something else, which is most of the time. The page reloads every five minutes, faithfully, and you look at it an hour later with no idea whether anything happened.

What you want then is a page that checks the part you care about after each reload, and makes it obvious when it's different. For example:

• Change the tab's title to "CHANGED: Order status", so you see it from any other tab.
• Highlight the part that changed in a bright colour, so you don't have to hunt for it.
• Stop reloading once the change has happened, so it isn't lost on the next reload.

Building a watcher for one page

This is a small tool, and you can describe it rather than write it. On the page you're watching, you might ask ScriptPanda:

Reload this page every 5 minutes. After each reload, check the order status. If it's different from last time, put "CHANGED" at the start of the tab title, highlight the status in yellow, and stop reloading until I click a Resume button.

Because ScriptPanda reads the page's structure as it builds, it finds the real status on the page rather than guessing. Be specific about the part you're watching: "the price under the product title", "the number of results", "the first row of the table".

Watchers that work well

• Watch one thing. "Tell me when anything on the page changes" fires on every clock, advert and counter. Pick the price, the status or the count.
• Pick a sensible interval. Every few minutes is plenty for most pages, and kinder to the site than every few seconds.
• Keep the tab where you'll see it. Pin it, so the changed title catches your eye.

What this won't do

A watcher like this is a tool inside the page, and that sets its limits:

• It only runs while the tab is open and Chrome is running. Close the tab, or the computer, and it stops.
• Chrome slows timers in tabs you haven't looked at for a while, so a hidden tab may reload a little later than you asked.
• It sees what the page shows you. If the page needs you to sign in again, the watcher sees the sign-in page.

If you need a page checked while your computer is off, with an email when it changes, that's a job for a page-monitoring service that checks from its own servers.

The short version

Use auto-refresh when you're watching the page anyway. When you're not, have the page watch itself: reload on a timer, check the one part you care about, and change the tab title the moment it's different.