The questions people ask most, answered plainly.
Yes, for idle timeouts. An inactivity timeout is measured from the last request the server saw for your session, so a real reload resets it. It does nothing against an absolute session limit that expires a fixed time after login.
Roughly two-thirds of the site's idle window — for a 30-minute timeout, every 20 minutes. It is tempting to refresh far more often, and on many apps that is merely wasteful. On others it fails outright: ASP.NET Core's cookie authentication only re-issues your session cookie on a request “more than halfway through the expiration window”, and Salesforce likewise ignores activity in the first half. See how it works for the full explanation.
Mostly. Browsers throttle timers in hidden tabs, so the clock here runs in a Web Worker and the intervals are longer than a minute. But Chrome's Memory Saver and similar features can freeze or discard a hidden tab outright, which pauses it — pin the tab and add the site to your browser's performance exceptions.
No, and neither can anything else that runs in a browser. Microsoft computes your Teams presence from your device's activity rather than from the Teams page — using the keyboard or mouse in any application keeps you Available, and it turns to Away after roughly five minutes of idle or when you lock the screen. Webex behaves the same way. A refreshing tab is simply not part of that signal. If you want to stay Available while reading, set your status manually in Teams or Webex; it holds until you change it. Full detail on the blacklist.
Extensions can reload tabs you already have open, which a website can't. If you only need one site kept warm, this page is enough and needs no install. If you want your existing tabs refreshed in place today, use the macOS helper or a dedicated auto-refresh extension. Our own extension — which can also keep sessions alive without reloading, for pages where a reload would destroy work — is in development and not yet in the Chrome Web Store.
The tool itself works in any modern browser on any operating system — it's just a web page. The optional real-tab helper is macOS-only, because it relies on macOS automation to talk to browsers.
A web page cannot see other browser tabs. The browser's same-origin policy isolates every site from every other, so no website — this one included — can read, list, or reload a tab it didn't open itself. This is a platform security boundary, not a missing feature. Reaching the tabs you already have open requires software on your own computer — see clairvoyant mode.