What does "A new version of the frontend is available. This page will update in X seconds" actually mean?

Configuration Frontend
1

Why I’m asking?

I’m running Home Assistant OS 18.3, core 2026.9.3, supervisor 2026.09.2, Frontend 20260826.7

On my Windows 11, I usually access Home Assistant from Rambox (a specialized app-focused browser based tool)

I had an issue where HA would keep showing the “A new version of the frontend is available. This page will update in X seconds”, and would restart when the countdown completes.

So I wanted to understand what exactly happens when this reload happens, and why is it stuck in a loop.

Posts about this message here in the forum didn’t talk about what actually happens there.

The documentation for frontend: states the following:

The Frontend integration provides the official frontend to control Home Assistant. It is enabled by default unless you’ve disabled or removed the default_config: line from your configuration.yaml file. …

Looking at default_config: page, frontend: isn’t listed anymore - so one of those is outdated.

There is no troubleshooting content in the page either.

I eventually resolved the issue by restarting Rambox, and I guess the issue has to do with multiple panes (think multiple browser tabs) having the UI open and active, causing the reload to fail reloading the new code.

Hence my question: What does it actually do? why would multiple tabs fail the reload, and is there a way to detect that multiple panes/tabs are open?

2

Short version: It’s clearing your browser cache. No idea whether the issue is specific to Rambox or not, or whether multiple tabs would affect it.

3

It looks like it will actually clear the browser ONLY if all other HA tabs are closed.
I wonder if there is a way to “disconnect” all other tabs (not logoff, just disconnect)

4

Did you get to the bottom of this? I have a similar but not identical message. " A new version of the frontend is available. It will be applied once you have saved or discarded your changes." I don’t know where changes might need to be saved or discarded.

5

just hit submit and it’ll do it for you.