Is there a way to stop a page's auto refresh?

[JeffB]

Pretty often I open a few tabs from a news page’s main page links to let the tabs open in the background while I’m skimming for useful articles. That allows me to navigate quickly from tab to tab since the pages have already loaded in the background for me.

Today I’ve run into a very annoying phenomenon on the National Review story page and a few others from there. The pages refresh every second or two, making it nearly impossible to read & it is an absurd waste of bandwidth, of course.

Is there a way to halt auto refreshes of pages within the Brave browser?

[289wk]

@JeffB

Maybe . . . in a Brave Browser New Window, go to: brave://settings/privacy

Click on Site and Shields Settings

You should see:

Scroll down further (and you will need to toggle some of the arrows, for the page to expand) . . .

Looking for settings in regard to sites being able to adjust, control Brave Browser. For example, where sites can manage protocols or windows.

Decide - in which cases - you want sites to NOT be so able.

Test that.

Otherwise, cookies sent from websites and stored by the Internet browser, can be part of what the website decides to do, about reloading its webpages.

[JeffB]

Thank you @ 289wk. I Went to the Content settings as you recommended, but saw only one toggle switch that looked like it might have an impact… namely, the speedreader/Reader mode. I activated it & went back. The National Review page wouldn’t load at all. I was left with a white screen. I went to another site and was met with an error message that said something along the lines of “If you are seeing this message, then you need to enable javascript to view this page correctly.” I clicked on the Brave Shields icon to the right of the url & saw that the “block scripts” toggle switch was activated. I deactivated it & the page loaded correctly. Then I went to the National Review page & it loaded fine… but when I clicked on a few stories, those pages all kept autorefreshing about every second. That is the behavior that makes them pretty unusable.

Perhaps there is currently no available fix for this issue.

In any event, here is a screenshot of the Content settings screen for Brave in my browser. Perhaps I am missing something?

This is a 9 year old thread. I am not sure if it is exactly the same problem or is even relevant to it, but maybe someone else can tell.

[fanboynz]

Try adding this into brave://adblock (custom filters)

nationalreview.com##+js(refresh-defuser)

[289wk]

@JeffB

I updated my previous reply.

---

Tips regarding Brave Shields:

I have more success, with:

• Brave Shields UP
• Either Allow All Cookies or Block 3rd Party Cookies, but NOT Blocking All Cookies
• Allowing JavaScripts from specific sources, but NOT Allowing All JavaScripts
• Trackers & Ads treatment: Aggressive (at first), and then incrementally relaxing that setting
• Fingerprinting (aka footprinting) blocking: Strict (at first), and then incrementally relaxing that setting

I almost NEVER use:

• All of Brave Shields UP
• All of Brave Shields DOWN

---

Shields Basics

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/categories/360001053072-Shields

How do I configure global and site-specific Shields settings?

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360023646212-How-do-I-configure-global-and-site-specific-Shields-settings

How do I use Shields while browsing?

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360022806212-How-do-I-use-Shields-while-browsing

---

[JeffB]

Thank you @ fanboynz

Sorry if I’m being a bit obtuse here, but I’m not adept at reading programmer type instructions. Just to make sure I understand… should I copy & paste the first line into a new browser window where the url would normally go, ignoring the parentheses? eg.:
brave://adblock then hit ENTER
and then do the same thing with the 2nd line you posted, again ignoring the (refresh-defuser): nationalreview.com##+js
and then hit ENTER again?

[fanboynz]

@fanboynz

nationalreview.com##+js(refresh-defuser)

Like this, see next to red dots: Then reload nationalreview page

[JeffB]

Thank you again @ 289wk
I found that browsing those security settings was rather interesting. I thought I had briefly done so before. It will probably be helpful for me in the future. I had typically just toggled the Brave shields on or off for websites in the past if I was having trouble with a site that I trusted and needed it to work right. One surprise is that it appears that Brave had stored different zoom settings for different web sites. I would have never guessed that.

I’m thinking that National Review may just be a quirky site. I do quite a bit of browsing & that type of behavior seems pretty rare.

[JeffB]

Wow, thanks again, @ fanboynz
That’s getting pretty deep into the settings. I appreciate the time & effort that you’ve so graciously shared.

I stumbled along, but did get there & got my screen to look pretty much like yours.

I clicked on the “save changes” button, but didn’t see any confirmation that it was saved, other than a brief change in the button itself. Maybe that’s all good and well & it was taken.
I went back to the main page, however, and clicked on a link & got the same result, though it did seem to refresh a tiny bit more slowly, but still did so continuously. Maybe it just seemed a tiny bit slower, or maybe it was because I didn’t have multiple tabs open.

The link was: https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/04/the-grand-strategic-folly-of-a-war-on-trade/

Maybe it is a quirk in my settings, such as a combination of settings that don’t play well together, or something about that particular website.

As a side note, are you a developer for the Brave browser?

Are these types of tweaks or the syntax for custom filters in a user’s manual or Wiki somewhere?

Regardless, thanks again to you… and to Brave as well. You are both the greatest.

edit: fwiw, this isn’t some huge concern of mine, I was just following a link someone had posted to an article. It may be some unique quirk to their site. I was hoping that there was some button or plug in or setting in Brave that fixed issues like that if this type of thing was fairly common around the web, or even if it only showed up on relatively occasions.
If there’s a relatively easy fix, I would be happy to learn it, but if it is very unusual and would be a pain to figure out, no need to fret about it for my sake.

Thanks again for everything.