Compare Chrome extensions: Cats Background Tab Theme vs LiveHosts

Stats Cats Background Tab Theme Cats Background Tab Theme LiveHosts LiveHosts
User count 7 10,000+
Average rating 0.00 3.47
Rating count 0 36
Last updated 2023-01-29 2022-03-29
Size 17.96K 59.17K
Version 1.3 2.0.0
Short description
Do you love cats? If so then you must install our cute and fluffy cats background tab theme. Switch your host/IP mappings in real time without editing your hosts file
Full summary

If you love cats then you will love our cats background tab theme. Your heart will melt each time you open your browser or a new tab and see one of these wonderful fluffy cats.

This background theme does more than display cute cat photos. It also displays the date/time in the right corner, as well as a Google Search box and a menu with links to some of the most popular websites online!

Don't stick with a boring default background. Download our cats background tab theme today.

LiveHosts is a Chrome extension that aims at providing a working (even if sub-obtimal) solution to a common nuisance that many web developers have to deal with every day. If you have multiple versions of your websites sharing the same host names on multiple environments, you often need to switch the assignments in your OS hosts file.

Other extensions (like the life-saving HostAdmin) can help with the cumbersomeness, but changes to the hosts file usually take an inconvenient amount of time to actually affect the browser.

Unfortunately, there is no way to make Chrome direct requests for a hostname to a specific IP without a standard redirect - you could set up a smart HTTP proxy, but it's often not possible or not convenient.

This extension settles for a sub-obtimal approach: requests to the indicated hostnames are redirected to the chosen IPs with an additional Host header. The browser's address bar reflects this behaviour showing the hostname right after the IP (e.g. http://127.0.0.1/www.example.com/). The extension also tries to take care of all requests to either the IP or the hostname in a consistent way.

Issues

After the redirect, the user is effectively in a different domain that the one they expected. They may notice some functional differences:

  • depending on the server, parts of a web page referring to the site URL (like href and src attributes) could be different from the original
  • window.location has a different value that can potentially throw off JavaScript snippets
  • most Cross-Origin request won't work