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.

There is no way to switch from one server to another without editing your hosts file, and doing that in multiple locations (hosts file and DNS server) is usually pretty laborious.

Most of the time, web applications just have one version of their site and one or more environments, and every request from the browser goes to a standard server (via localhost, for example).

Other extensions like HostAdmin can help you with the cumbersomeness, but it's not always possible or convenient to set up a proxy and to make changes to the hosts file.

There is a similar (and much more user-friendly) problem with the standard redirect from the browser, and in order to make it work, you need to tell your users to use the application instead of the browser.

This is one of the main problems with web applications - you can't guarantee that your users will always use your application instead of the browser.