A tour of the popup

Click the toolbar icon and a small window opens — that's the popup, the control center for the tab you're on. Here's every part of it: the header buttons, the four tabs, the footer, and how to dock it as a side panel.

Refresh Pilot

IntervalTimerTabsMonitor

Start

The popup: header on top, four tabs below it, and the controls for the current tab underneath.

The header

From left to right across the top:

• Icon, name and version — so you can see at a glance which version you're running (currently 2.0.0).
• 🔔 Bell — "kill alarm." Stops any alert sound that's ringing. Alert sounds are played in the background, so they keep ringing even after the page moves on — the bell is your mute button. The keyboard does the same job: Alt+Shift+K.
• Side panel button — docks these same controls to the side of your browser window so they stay open while you browse. Details below.
• Dashboard button — opens the web dashboard, a full-screen settings site. One click is enough: the extension connects it for you automatically, no password to type.
• Unlock / PRO chip — on the free plan this reads "Unlock $2.99/year" and opens the checkout; once you subscribe it becomes a PRO chip. What you get is on the Free vs PRO page.

The four tabs

Interval

The home tab, and where you'll spend most of your time. Pick how often to refresh (fixed, random or an exact duration), open the Options accordion to change how each reload behaves, tune the on-page countdown overlay — and press Start.

Timer

Refreshing that starts later. A countdown start PRO arms a one-off delayed start ("begin in 10 minutes" or "at 9:00 tomorrow"), and weekly schedules PRO repeat automatically — "this page, weekdays at 09:00."

Tabs

Your mission control, all FREE: a live "Refreshing now" list of every tab that's currently refreshing (with its own countdown, pause and stop buttons, and a Stop all button), plus an Alerts feed of recent keyword matches. The tab's label shows a count badge of active jobs. Full details in The Tabs dashboard.

Monitor

Turns refreshing into watching: tell Refresh Pilot what to look for — "in stock", a price pattern, any change — and how to alert you when it happens. Start with Watch a page for changes, then explore keywords & expressions. On the free plan you can watch one plain-text keyword; more keywords and the fancier match types are PRO.

The footer

The thin line at the very bottom of the popup is the status footer — it tells you what Refresh Pilot is doing on the tab you're looking at, so you always know whether this tab is idle, refreshing, or being watched.

Side panel mode

The popup closes as soon as you click elsewhere — that's how Chrome popups work. If you'd rather keep the controls open while you browse, click the side panel button in the header: the popup closes and the exact same page reopens docked to the side of your window. In panel mode the same header button becomes "Close side panel."

Two things get nicer in panel mode:

• Clicking a row in the Tabs tab jumps to that tab — and the panel stays open (the popup would have closed).
• The monitor's element picker also keeps the panel open while you point at the page.