On July 26, 2008 Stoyan Stefanov published his seminal blog post location=location which listed 535 ways to refresh a page using JavaScript. At the time I was just learning how to JavaScript (by hacking about with the at-the-time flagship Prototype JS) and legitimately used this page as a resource when I needed to learn how to trigger a full-page refresh.
In a fit of whiskey-fueled madness I thought (as any sane person would) "Why not bundle all 535 of these into one object and build a script that will pick one at random when a refresh is needed?" We have since added 31 more because the web has not stood still and neither has our poor judgment, bringing the total to 566.
Update, 2026: In a brief moment of clarity, it was discovered that the original implementation passed JavaScript strings to window.setTimeout, which evaluates them as code. This is eval. A previous "fix" had switched to new Function, which is also eval. Both approaches were 3 evals in a trench coat. The 536 566 strings have since been replaced with actual JavaScript functions, which is the correct way to do this and feels profoundly out of place here.
And here we are. To be clear: this is the worst thing anyone's ever made. Nobody in their right mind should use this in their project.
That said, if you really really really want to, you can try it out here or here's how to use it yourself!
First off, you need to include freshmaker.js into your page (maybe someday I'll put this up as a bower package or something equally time-wasting). Any time you need to trigger a page refresh just call _fm(); and Bob's your uncle.
Freshmaker has no dependencies other than possibly your own lack of self-respect and a stiff drink. It originally required ECMAScript 5 for Object.keys, but we've since added Reflect (ES2015) and the Navigation API (Chrome 102+, 2022), so the honest answer is that not all 566 methods will work in all browsers. This is fine. This is a feature. If you're still on IE 8 you've got bigger problems to deal with than not being able to use this stupid thing. You might also possibly have a time machine, in which case please go back to 2018 and stop me from writing this (also while you're at it tell me to buy NVIDIA stock).
If you're curious to know which one of the 566 options is being used on any given refresh, just pass a number as an argument to the function. It will delay for that many seconds and log the function being used to the console! I know! _fm(5); will wait for 5 seconds before firing and console.log() the refresh method being used. Any argument passed that's not a number is ignored.