iGoogleiGoogle is a great way to manage your life under one page. Checking your mails, RSS feeds, managing your schedule, chatting with friends on a single page has been done by Google quite well. iGoogle keeps on refreshing automatically so that users get updated content even if they have left the iGoogle open for some minutes. This reduces the load on users to refresh it manually every time but it has been annoying users in some cases when your gadgets refreshes when you don’t want them to.

Many users have been asking Google to provide this feature as optional. Google surely needs to work on its iGoogle API and should provide individual refreshing settings for all the gadgets. This will help users as well as it will let developers customize their applications more deeply.

How to Disable iGoogle Auto Refreshing Functionality?

1. Using refresh=0

Adding ?refresh=0 to the iGoogle link will not stop iGoogle from refreshing automatically but practically it extends the time between two refresh. This is the most simplest and effective way I have discovered. Though this method will make iGoogle to refresh slowly but if the above method don’t work for you try the next one.

Link: http://www.google.com/ig?refresh=0

2. Changing Browser Settings

iGoogle uses meta tags to refresh it. We can change settings in browsers to not to allow refreshing of pages. This can be done as following:

In Internet Explorer, you can change the settings in browser on weather to allow pages to automatically refresh or not. This can be done by Tools -> Internet Options -> Security -> Custom Level -> Allow META REFRESH (Enable/Disable). Un-check the box in order to block pages from refreshing. Note: This will also stop other pages and websites from auto refreshing and thus some web apps might not work properly.

For Mozilla Firefox, you can download a plugin named RefreshBlocker and set up a blacklist. Add iGoogle to that blacklist. This will only ban certain pages from refreshing. Note: Please change the list type to blacklist else the all the other sites will be blocked other than in the list.

How to Enable iGoogle Auto Refreshing Functionality?

On the other hand some people face problem that iGoogle is not automatically refreshing.

If using Internet Explorer, make sure that Meta Refresh Checkbox is checked. This can be done at Tools -> Internet Options -> Security -> Custom Level -> Allow META REFRESH (Enable/Disable).

Firefox users should check if any addon life RefreshBlocker or so is not installed. Addons like ReloadEvery can reload iGoogle or any other website or page after a defined time.