If you are checking a website where contents are updated very often but are not dynamically updated using JavaScript, then you may have to manually refresh it yourself. If you do not want to manually hit F5 or click on the reload button, then you can use an extension for Firefox called ReloadMatic.
ReloadMatic is a useful extension for periodically refreshing or reloading a webpage in various tabs of the web browser. After the installation it is added to the context menu of the web browser. You can right-click inside any tab and select how to reload the tab.
There are many options for reloading the currently open webpage inside the tab – default setting is not to reload. You can change it to reloading every 5 seconds to every 4 hours. You can also specify a custom interval of your own. There is also an option to randomize the interval for reloading the web page. You can reload by disabling the cache so that whole webpage and all of its contents are downloaded each time it is reloaded. You can choose to reload only if first time loading the webpage was not successful.
Instead of the webpage, ReloadMatic reloads a tab. But when the URL of a tab changes, it will automatically stop reloading the tab. But if you want it to keep reloading the original URL, then you can choose the “Sticky reload” option from the right-click context-menu.
If you are trying to visit a new website and it suddenly reloads the tab, then you can enable the “Smart timing” feature which prevents reloading the tab when you are busy doing something in that tab.
In the options for the ReloadMatic extension, you can find advanced settings for cache control, custom intervals, POST support and many other features. The extension can also be integrated with other supported features of the web browser such as tab restore, pinning, and the incognito mode.
You can get ReloadMatic extension for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reloadmatic/.