Should refetchOnWindowFocus be true globally?

[satejbidvai]

In large codebases, I've seen refetchOnWindowFocus turned off by default.

When users return to a tab after a long time, seeing the latest data is still a good experience.
For e.g., Let's say a page renders a list view or a list of notifications; when a user returns after a couple of hours, and the data has been updated, it's a good UX to re-fetch the list in the background.

I tried googling for any blogs/articles where I can find if it's good practice to keep the refetchOnWindowFocus on / off.

As the default decided by the React Query team is ON, there must be good reasons for that, and I wanted to understand them as I don't see them mentioned in the docs - just that one can disable it globally:

You can disable this globally or per-query using the refetchOnWindowFocus option

[87xie]

Before TanStack Query v5, some unexpected refetches, detailed in PR #4805, likely led to the default setting of refetchOnWindowFocus being turned off to avoid unnecessary data fetching.

Providing a good user experience out of the box is important from a library perspective. Therefore, having refetchOnWindowFocus default to true ensures that users see the most up-to-date data when they return to a page.

That's my point, but I'm unsure about the actual considerations.

[TkDodo]

The idea is to have all the flags on per default and then have the user define a staleTime for their resources because all the refetches respect staleTime.