What might be a good idea for Javascript-heavy web apps is to make an Ajax call to the server to see if a refresh of the page is required.
Most of them are open from other tasks. But that doesn't make them a distraction. They're there for when the current task finishes and I can go back to them.
The alternative is to close them all down and reopen them, which is vastly more time consuming.
quick pjax e.g.:
<html data-lastupdated="1234567890"...
$.getJSON('/lastupdated.json', function(lastupdated) {
if(lastupdated > $('html').data('lastupdated'))
{
$('a[data-pjax]').removeAttr('data-pjax');
}
});