Using social network sites is considerably different than using an online chat service. While the messages in any online chat service get automatically scrolled down with the appearance of newer messages, in the social networking sites the posts and tweets stay in their place until you refresh the web page. This is especially true for Twitter website when you access it from a desktop computer. When new tweets are available for you to see, the Twitter webpage just shows a message on top – “View New Tweets” along with the number of the new tweets available. The number of tweets is also displayed in the browser window title so that you can easily know about the new tweets.
This is all great if you are currently doing something else and not really paying attention to the Twitter web page – you can see the the number of new tweets in the tab/window title of the browser and check the tweets. But this could be frustrating if you are already interacting with tweets on the Twitter website – even though you are on Twitter web site, you still have to refresh the web page or click on “View New Tweets” button to see the new tweets.
The Firefox extension Auto Refresh brings the solution to this irritating problem. As the name depicts, this extension keeps refreshing the tweets as the new tweets become available – you never get to see the annoying “View New Tweets” button and can read the tweets without having to refresh the page every 5 minutes.
Auto Refresh is a very basic extension without any options or even a toolbar button. You won’t hear anything from it after installing, other than that it will keep automatically refreshing the new tweets when you are on the Twitter web page in your Firefox browser.
You can get the Auto Refresh extension for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-refresh-for-twitter/.