With the addition of the LiveReload browser extension, and a running LiveReload server embedded into our BookPub application, the browser is now capable of connecting to the backend server using a web socket to monitor changes. When the Spring Boot DevTools detects a change that should trigger a reload, it will trigger the reload as well as send a notification to the browser to reload the page as well.
If there is ever a need to disable the LiveReload part of the DevTools functionality, it can easily be achieved by adding the spring.devtools.livereload.enabled=false property via any of the supported configuration options, be that a property file, environment variable, or a system property.