A mystery bug is causing Google Chrome extensions to suddenly fail

Date:
Wed, 06 Jul 2022 14:26:20 +0000

Description:
A bug in the Chromium engine is causing buttons in certain extensions to become unresponsive.

FULL STORY ======================================================================

A bug in the Chromium browser engine has been causing extensions to stop working for users of Google Chrome .

Ji Sigurdsson, founder and CEO of CrankWheel Screen Sharing, was one of the first to identify this issue. He says it is affecting around 3% to 5% of
users of certain extensions.

Sigurdssons entry in the Chromium bug report reads: Event handlers registered via chrome.browserAction.onClicked.addListener should get dispatched to when the browser action button/icon is clicked by the user.

For users affected by the glitch, it means that buttons in certain extensions become unresponsive. Google Chrome: bugs, glitches and errors

CrankWheel Screen Sharing users first started to notify the company of the
bug on 10 April 2022. It's unclear when it first became a problem, but it appears the bug may have been introduced with Chrome 100.

The companys initial response was to disable and re-enable the extension, which seemed to work at first. However, when the same error happened on Sigurdssons own computer, he was able to submit screen recordings and further information to Chromium. Read more

The best Google Chrome extensions in 2022: do more with your browser

5 Google Chrome features that make it better than Microsoft Edge

Your Google Chrome extensions could be used to secretly track you online

Other extensions that use the same browserAction API include a couple of password managers - Norton Password Manager and LastPass - and a pair of Googles own creations: the Picture in Picture extension and Google Mail Checker. Sigurdsson believes these could also be subject to the problematic glitch.

The Iceland-based company posted a job on Upwork last week, offering $35-$150 per hour for two days initially, in the hope that a Chromium C++ expert [can] dig into the bug and hopefully solve it.

Also up for grabs are a pair of $4,000 bounties. One is for being able to consistently replicate the issue, which occurs on at least macOS and Windows and another for an actual fix. Shield your browsing activity with the best
VPN services around



======================================================================
Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/a-mystery-bug-is-causing-google-chrome-extensio ns-to-suddenly-fail/


--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 (Linux/64)
* Origin: tqwNet Technology News (1337:1/100)