Countdown overlay & badge

While a tab auto-refreshes, Refresh Pilot shows you two countdowns: a small pill on the page itself and a tiny badge on the toolbar icon. Both are on by default, both are optional, and this page explains everything they show.

The overlay pill FREE

The overlay is controlled by the 👁 "Show visual timer" switch in the Interval tab — on by default. When a job is running, the pill shows:

• A status dot — green while running, amber while paused, red when stopped.
• The countdown — MM:SS, switching to H:MM:SS for intervals of an hour or more.
• ×count — how many refreshes have completed so far.
• Two buttons — ❚❚ / ▶ to pause and resume, and ✕ to stop.
• A thin progress bar under the pill, filling as the interval elapses. It has its own sub-toggle (on by default); the dashboard calls it "Progress ring."
• A "Match:" banner that flashes when the monitor finds your keyword, then hides itself after 5 seconds.

The pill draws in its own isolated layer, so the website's styling can't break it — and it follows your dark mode automatically.

Positions and dragging

Four corner positions to choose from — bottom-right (the default), bottom-left, top-right, top-left — each sitting 16 pixels in from the edges. There's also a fifth position: custom, which you set by simply dragging the pill. Grab it anywhere except its buttons and put it where you like; it can't be dragged outside the window.

Dragged positions are remembered per website: park the pill top-center on shop.example.com and it will be there next time on that site, while every other site keeps your corner setting. A dragged spot wins over the corner setting for that site.

When refreshing stops

The pill doesn't just vanish — it flashes a short farewell for about a second and a half, telling you why it stopped:

• "Stopped" — you stopped it yourself.
• "Limit reached" — the Stop after N limit was hit.
• "Match found" — the monitor found your keyword and stop-on-match kicked in.
• "Error page" — error detection stopped the job.

The toolbar badge

Even with the tab in the background, the toolbar icon keeps you posted with a tiny colored badge:

1:30

The badge ticks down on the toolbar icon — visible from any tab.

The countdown reads MM:SS under an hour (04:32) and H:MM from an hour up (1:05). The green YES is sticky: it stays until the next start or stop, so if the monitor matched while you were away, one glance at the toolbar tells you.

The countdown text is controlled by the "Show badge countdown" setting (on by default) on the web dashboard's General page — turn it off and the badge stops showing the ticking numbers.