I debugged a web application from Visual Studio 2013 (having recently upgraded from Visual Studio 2012) and then inspected the network traffic in search of a performance issue. I was rather surprised to find that the page was making calls back to a different port on my localhost server with a long URL containing “arterySignalR/poll?transport=longPolling“. A little googling revealed that this was part of a new feature called Browser Link.

This enables the developer to debug in multiple browsers at the same time and refresh them all with one click and can also apparently be used as the basis of some interesting development tools. All of which sounded fine but you wonder why it was on by default when  debugging in a single browser and not using any of these interesting development tools…

The article helpfully gives a few suggestions on to turn it off; adding <add key="vs:EnableBrowserLink" value="false"/> in the web.config worked fine but clutters up the web.config file with settings related to debugging.

This left “In the Browser Link dropdown menu, uncheck Enable Browser Link“. The toolbar button was not visible on the screen as all the toolbars were turned off to save space but the usual Windows standard is that anything on a toolbar should also be accessible from a menu somewhere. Unfortunately while it might be there somewhere I could not find it so I ended up turning on toolbars until the relevant button turned up. For reference, the Browser Link dropdown menu is on the Standard toolbar.

Using: Visual Studio 2013;