crx-hotreload: a great tool for chrome addon autorefresh
Let me be lazy today and relay some good work made by a Moscow based SW developer named Vitaly Gordon. That fellow has published an autorefresh javascript snippet which improves extension development productivity by a signifcant factor. In dev mode, edit and save one of your build files and your browser will automatically reload the extension and the current active tab ... neat! Comparing to other solutions I've found on the net, this one is very elegant since it does not require any change to your build process, just inclusion of a snippet in your manifest. Code can be found on git. Thanks Vitaly!