No Refresh

Removes the need to constantly switch between your text-editor/IDE and the browser window while developing locally.This extension removes the need to constantly switch between your text-editor/IDE and the browser window to refresh and view the updates and changes.

The extension will refresh any page in the browser, if it has changed on the server.
More accurately: It will refresh any resource located at an URI, provided the server is now serving a different resource at that location.

Which means that this will work for any HTML/XML/Image/JSON/etc. page. Even on malformed markup, or on 404/403 error pages.
This also means that it doesn't matter what your server infrastructure is. It will work irrespective of whether you are running PHP on Apache, or Webrick/Thin for Rails or other Ruby apps.

This works only on localhost and 127.0.0.1 domains. If you have your local environment configured to display something else, this extension will not work. Leave a note if you have a different local domain that you would like to be able to use this on. The more common ones will be included in subsequent releases.

NOTE:
This extension achieves it's goal by conducting a fairly resource intensive standard polling technique. The rationale behind the choice is given below:

There are many alternate approaches to this problem. Why were those approaches not adopted?

A: Fetch only headers first by using a HTTP HEAD request through xmlhttprequest.
Then check if page has changed by checking ETAG or look for 304 status codes.
Unfortunately this is highly unreliable. Most web frameworks that generate markup, do so dynamically and even if the actual output is the same, the ETAG and status codes don't necessarily reflect that because the output is regenerated everytime. This problem can be compounded if there is some variety of middleware between the server and the application, that rewrites output in a way unknown to the application.

B: Push changes from the server (COMET, webSocket et al.):
The sheer number of architecture/s that one would have to look into makes this infeasible.