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Comment by bamboleo | Hacker News Reader

Little known fact: web-ext not only can launch both Firefox and Chrome in a new profile with the extension preloaded, but it will also refresh them when any of the extensions’ files changes.

It’s game changing.

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Heh, once you want even tighter feedback than just reloading the extension itself, try out developing a extension with ClojureScript ;)

https://github.com/binaryage/chromex is a good starting point if you're curious.

> it will also refresh them when any of the extensions’ files changes. I don't see that in the docs. would it support webpack? for now, I'm using webpack-extension-reloader plugin for an extension I built for Notion.so and it works (reload) for chrome. https://github.com/GorvGoyl/Notion-Boost-browser-extension

It’s unrelated to the build, it works even if you edit files directly.

The downside of this is that it means no HMR support whatsoever.

Not really. I would prefer to keep my profile which has all my history, sessions etc instead of launching a new Firefox every time. Reloading extensions is really not that hard, especially with something like https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/extensions-reloade...

I'm sorry, but I seem to not understand how that extension is better than web-ext. web-ext reloads the extension automatically when it changes on disk, "Extensions Reloader" seems to require you to either click a button to reload, or setup your build system to redirect current browser session to "http://reload.extensions", both inferior solutions to just using web-ext.

Me too, in fact it has a —preserve-changes flag (or something like that) that combined with the -p flag let’s you have a profile just for development.

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