Subject: page RELOAD by Firefox

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2016 17:21:57 -0500

My limited G4 data allocation is being depleted much too rapidly for my
budget.  I suspect that the culprit is the web page of a personal weather
station (PWS) in which page measurements are updated every ten minutes.  I
keep a Firefox window open to monitor the web page.

I do not understand the mechanism, but every time I click on the window or
tab in which the PWS web page is displayed, I see the latest data, without
clicking the Firefox RELOAD button.  Thus, it appears to me that the PWS
web page somehow is notifying Firefox every time the web page is updated,
and that Firefox is automatically loading the update.

Is there a way to keep Firefox from automatically reloading this
particular web page?  Or am I misunderstanding what is happening here?

RLH

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From: Ben Caradoc-Davies <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 12:24:15 +1200

> particular web page?  Or am I misunderstanding what is happening here?

Some pages are automatically reloaded with the HTML meta refresh tag:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_refresh

For example, in <head>:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="600">

If the page in question is refreshed with an HTML meta refresh tag, it 
might be possible to change this behaviour in Firefox by setting 
accessibility.blockautorefresh to true in about:config:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Accessibility.blockautorefresh

I have not tried this option, but it is documented.

Kind regards,

-- 
Ben Caradoc-Davies <[email-masked]>
Director
Transient Software Limited <http://transient.nz/>
New Zealand

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From: Seeker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2016 17:10:10 -0700

> keep a Firefox window open to monitor the web page.
Is this web page on the PWS or out on the internet?
Is the PWS using the same data connection you are using to access the 
web page?
Is there advertising on this page?
If you do not leave the page open in a tab, does your data allocation 
still get rapidly depleted?

Maybe with more information someone will have an alternative suggestion.

> particular web page?  Or am I misunderstanding what is happening here?

Another response already mentioned there are some add-ons related to 
refresh.

For a limited data connection you might also want to go through the list 
of plugins and change the settings for some of them to 'Ask to activate'.

If you have not already looked into them, maybe look into privacy 
badger, noscript, and some some kind of ad blocker.

Later, Seeker

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2016 23:11:47 -0500

On Sun, September 18, 2016 7:10 pm, Seeker wrote:
> web page? Is there advertising on this page?

The page is associated with the weather underground:

https://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=KTXSMITH14

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From: Seeker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 13:33:42 -0700

> https://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=KTXSMITH14
Looks like some kind of widget/script things to me that keep things up
to date, without requiring a refresh of the page.

Thought I saw something about 10 minutes when I loaded the page earlier
in the morning, but going back later, current status is updated multiple
times per minute, the radar map less often, but not too many minutes in
between.

The advertising cycles as well, so the amount of weather data versus ad
data is a question.

Privacy badger is not an ad blocker, but for this site, blocking the
potential trackers blocks the ads.

With noscript installed/enabled looks like the only thing that loads is
the current conditions and reload/refresh is required to see updated
information.

Later, Seeker

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From: "Neal P. Murphy" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2016 19:53:15 -0400

> particular web page?  Or am I misunderstanding what is happening here?

You could only open the page only when you wish to check the weather, then close it.

Some web pages run a JS script when loaded. That script then schedules itself to run asynchronously (in the background) every so often. It may be that the browser checks for updates/changes far more often than every 10 minutes.

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From: Terence Levings <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2016 18:52:13 -0400

> particular web page?  Or am I misunderstanding what is happening here?

Likely some scripts are running on the page and refreshing the content
periodically, many websites do this now.  There are plugins available that
can force stop the scripts on individual pages.