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 silentl

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

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2022-07-06 20:00:14

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 screen-sharing extension for sales teams.

As described in the Chromium bug report, event handlers registered via chrome.browserAction.onClicked.addListener sometimes will fail to get dispatched when the associated button or icon is clicked by the user. For an individual using an affected extension, the result would be that the extension's button just stops responding to click events.

"Around April 10th, we started getting reports from several users that clicking the CrankWheel button in their browser was not causing anything to happen," explained Sigurdsson in a blog post published last month. "Our initial suggestion to users was to disable and re-enable our extension, and that seemed to do the trick."

"Five days later, the issue randomly reproduced on my machine, and I was able to confirm that it is a Google Chrome / Chromium problem, not a problem with our extension, and I registered an issue on the Chromium issue tracker, along with screen recordings that confirm the reproduction and provide some extra detail."