[timblair]

I think you're confusing the who the "user" is in this case. It's not Joe Bloggs out on the internet who wants to see fresh content on your site; it's you, the web developer, working on your local machine, building a web site or application.

The live-reload functionality is there as a development workflow tool, to automatically reload the page to see the results of the latest code change, rather than manually switching to the browser and hitting ⌘R/F5.