Evirgen — Auto Refresh

Per-tab auto page refresh with presets (5/10/15/20 min), custom intervals, a live countdown, per-tab on/off and a one-button stop-all.

Zero dependencies, plain vanilla JavaScript. A kaktusdev.net project.

Evirgen means "the one who turns" in Turkic mythology — a fitting name for a refresher.

Türkçe README · Privacy policy

Why it's light

• The timer lives in the content script, not the service worker. The SW wakes only for settings changes and a handful of sparse badge updates per cycle; the rest of the time it sleeps.
• Worker-based countdown. Chrome throttles window timers in background tabs (intensive throttling = one wakeup per minute), which would wreck exactly the tabs people auto-refresh. Worker timers are exempt. If the page CSP blocks blob workers, a self-correcting chunked setTimeout watchdog takes over — the reload is guaranteed either way (the two layers race; first one wins).
• Sparse badge marks: hour boundaries → 5-minute marks in the last 90 min → minute marks in the last 10 min → 30/10 s. Even a 24-hour interval costs only ~50 SW wakeups.
• Session-only settings in storage.session: closing a tab (or the browser) cleans everything up automatically. tabs.onRemoved garbage-collects as well.
• The refresh cycle is self-sustaining: after each reload the content script re-injects, asks the SW for its config, and re-arms.

Install (developer mode)

python3 build.py

• Chrome / Edge: chrome://extensions → Developer mode → Load unpacked → dist/chrome/
• Firefox: about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox → Load Temporary Add-on → dist/firefox/manifest.json

Store-ready packages are produced as dist/evirgen-<version>-{chrome,firefox}.zip.

Adding a language

1. Drop a JSON file into src/locales/ (e.g. de.json) — use en.json as the key template.
2. Add it to the languages list in src/locales/index.json:

   { "code": "de", "name": "Deutsch" }

3. Rebuild with python3 build.py.

The default language is detected from the system (navigator.language); users can switch in the popup, and the preference is kept in storage.local.

Notes

• Minimum interval is 5 seconds (enforced in code).
• The "hard reload" option bypasses the cache (tabs.reload({bypassCache: true})) — useful for monitoring pages.
• Browser-internal pages (chrome://, about:, extension pages) can't run content scripts, so they can't be auto-refreshed; the popup says so.
• test/test.html is a standalone page that counts reloads and logs timestamps + deltas — handy for verifying timing behavior.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.