Why does Firefox refresh pages after a few minutes?

[FrankSMS]

Is this because the web designer has designed this to happen? Because it happens on a lot of sites, many you wouldn't think need to be refreshed at all. Can I control how often this happens? Can it be disabled?

When I load a bunch of tabs I don't want to come back to a black screen because the thing is refreshing itself. The whole point of tabs is multitasking where we can open a bunch of tabs and they load in the background so they're fully loaded when we get around to opening them. That is the point of tabs I thought. Because the faster the internet gets the more garbage advertising and media they feel the need to cram in there. Its never ending. What is needed are websites devoted to a non-Javascript experience. Javascript sucks SO bad. Its like sludge in digital arteries. Just a total abomination of technology.

[DanRaisch]

How about an example of a site where you see this problem?

[Grumpus]

This might help for anything Firefox is doing Browser Cache Check Doc Frequency
This would only be for locally stored information in the cache, what a site does would need more information, the sites where this occurs which Dan asked for.

[therube]

You could try toggling the Pref, accessibility.blockautorefresh, to 'true'.
Depending on how a site is refreshing, it might or might not help.
Likewise, disabling refresh could "break" certain sites.

Like if disabled (set to 'true'), when you 'Submit' here (at mozillazine) the page will not automatically refresh, showing your post.

[FrankSMS]

Both these suggestions look very hopeful. Thank you!
I noticed another one that may be useful to try:
services.sync.prefs.sync.accessibility.blockautorefresh

I set the Browser Cache Check Doc Frequency to 0 and the other 2 to block. We'll see how that works.

[Grumpus]

services.sync.prefs.sync.accessibility.blockautorefresh should only affect things if you are using Sync.
There is a browser.cache.frequency_experiment found this Disable randomised Firefox HTTP cache decay