It's a little known fact that you can easily make these kind of keyboard shortcuts globally by making a Service. Here's how to make a global service that reloads the browser:

  1. Open Automator
  2. Select Service
  3. Search for run Applescript
  4. Copy and paste one of the following Applescripts
  5. Change the Service receives selected drop down list to "No input" 
  6. Save the service  (Automator will ask you what to name it)

You can then find the service under "Services" inside the Application's Menu.

You can also assign it to a global shortcut by:

  1. Open the Keyboard section in System Preferences
  2. Find your service under the Services list
  3. Click the service to reveal the Add Shortcut button
  4. Type the shortcut (Like Command+Ctrl+R)

Applescript for Safari:

    on run
      tell application "Safari"
        do JavaScript "window.location.reload()" in current tab of window 1
        activate
      end tell
    end run

Applescript for Chrome:

    on run
      tell application "Google Chrome" to tell the active tab of its first window
        reload
      end tell
      tell application "Google Chrome" to activate
    end run

Can anyone explain why these scripts that do the exact same thing for different browsers are so different? How could one learn to write these things?

For anyone who wants to make this in Windows, just script it with AutoHotKey.

I have shortcut keys that send me to all of my most-used programs. For example, winkey+y moves me to chrome (if there are many open, it will cycle through them). winkey+s to Sublime Text, winkey+t to Total Commander, winkey+b to vim.

They're incredibly easy to write, and adding a refresh into it is child's play (just add a ctrl+r after moving to the window in the script).

To see the power of AutoHotkey, look at this:

http://www.autohotkey.net/~joten/bug.n.html

A guy made DWM (a keyboard-operated tiling window manager[1]) for Windows using AutoHotkey scripts. And I have to tell, after testing it for some time, it is amazing (and tiling WMs are amazing in general).

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager

I just use LiveReload for this.

Yes. A thousand times yes. I used to have a vim plugin[1] for reloading Chrome also. LiveReload[2] is far and away the way to go.

[1]: https://github.com/mkitt/browser-refresh.vim

[2]: http://livereload.com/

I am so happy. Thank you for these.

Another great tool for Mac: http://incident57.com/codekit/

CodeKit is "ok". But I prefer 100 times to use the command line for this kind of things.

Also LiveReload allows you to run it on another sevrer.

With LR, I actually had to un-train myself from constantly reloading the browser window. Now I just save a file in my IDE, and LR does it for me. I couldn't imagine going back to anything else.

And in case of CSS LR does not even reload the page, it injects CSS. Very handy for styling some "in between" elements—popovers and stuff like that.

I normally use Livereload, but this inspired me to whip up this Alfred (http://alfredapp.com) extension - https://github.com/brickattack/Chrome_Reload.alfredextension

If you map it to a global hotkey, you're not limited to using it in any one program.

Can the OP edit the title to say "for Mac OSX" please?

What a rollercoaster of emotions you put me through

Only works on Mac OS X in its current form, as it uses embedded AppleScript.

Forked this so that it saves the current view (if unsaved) before reloading:

https://github.com/bradleyboy/BrowserRefresh-Sublime

I've created an AutoHotKey script last month about that :

http://pastebin.com/uXF5B5yy

Thanks, this worked for now!