Programming Tutorials

  If you have attempted to bring the modern React developer experience (DX) to Chrome Extension development, you have likely hit a specific, workflow-killing wall. You set up Vite, get the popup rendering locally, but the moment you touch a Content Script, the abstraction leaks. HMR stops working. Styles don't update. You find yourself manually reloading the extension in  chrome://extensions  and refreshing the target web page just to see a one-line code change. This creates a feedback loop latency that makes modern UI development impossible. This guide details exactly why standard Vite configurations fail in the browser extension context and provides a rigorous, production-ready architecture using React, Vite, TypeScript, and CRXJS to solve it. The Root Cause: Why Standard HMR Fails in Extensions To fix the problem, we must understand the architecture of the browser runtime. Standard Vite HMR relies on a WebSocket connection between the browser client and the local devel...