If you can find and fix this subtle Chromium bug that breaks some extensions, there's $8k waiting for you

For the past three months, an elusive bug in Google's open-source Chromium project has been causing a small percentage of Chrome extensions to silently fail. The bug affects about three to five percent of users of several popular Chrome browser extensions, according to Jói Sigurdsson, founder and CEO of CrankWheel, maker of a …

[Alumoi]

LastPass among affected

So Google has finally came up with a replacement?

[jake]

$4000 to reproduce and $4000 to fix‽

I made more doing a little custom bailing this morning ...

[Gene Cash]

XUL

I don't remember stuff happening like this with XUL, why is Chromium more fragile?

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Re: XUL

Because your Chrome version X could be running any number of experiments or feature roll outs, so is very different to my Chrome version X.

Testing this in any traditional way is probably so bad they've stopped.

[Andy The Hat]

Not just extensions?

I noticed the behaviour described (buttons work then stop) yesterday on an installation with no extensions. Using Anglo-Saxon incantations then reloading the page restored functionality with no further failure. Was it just me or is this a deeper issue than extensions?

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

Re: Not just extensions?

It could as easily be a bug in the page. IIRC, thanks to the magic of threads, the browser can appear responsive while the page is blocked. Or it might have "debounce" logic that has failed. (Something threw and it didn't catch it? Or async code never returned at all?) Or something could have erroneously swallowed the event. Or it could have accidentally set `pointer-events:none`. And so on.

In short there are a myriad things that could go wrong. The first step would be to open the web inspector and see was happening.

[jake]

Re: Not just extensions?

You missed my favorite: Stray cosmic ray flipped a bit ... especially useful when getting the person I'm talking to up to speed on the subject might take longer than the life-span of said cosmic ray.

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

Re: Not just extensions?

I have an exciting collection of CCD images of cosmic rays at various interesting angles from head on blobs to near horizontal traces. Earthbound, too. This was back when CCDs needed to be cooled and not everybody had multiple devices in their phones...

FWIW, I think you could update your error mechanism to a disturbance caused by an unintentional, row-hammer-style bit flip.

[John D'oh!]

Cosmic Ray

I used to go to school with him. Of course, he wasn't so cosmic then just plain old Ray.