gorhill
commented
8 years ago When extension not there (or disabled): no crashes or hangs
I cannot reproduce any hang or crash. If the browser crashes, report to Chromium devs, you probably have a tainted Chrome installation, try re-installing after cleaning your computer: https://decentsecurity.com/holiday-tasks/.
Have seen the same problem when using uBlock Origin which was removed because it kept crashing Google Chrome (both work okay in Firefox). I've seen Gorhill's responses claiming Javascript cannot cause the crash of Google Chrome. Yet the web browser doesn't crash with his extensions disabled. I and other users have encountered the crashing or hanging with his extensions enabled in Google Chrome. When extension not there (or disabled): no crashes or hangs. When extension is there (enabled): sometimes crashes or hangs but a reload gets web browser working again.
The following extensions were installed by me and are enabled (there are some more but they are disabled for now):
Context Menu Search Empty New Tab Page <-- could this be conflicting? Nimbus Screenshot and Screencast OneTab Tabs to the Front uMatrix (uBlock Origin is disabled)
The Empty New Tab page not only opens blank new tabs (and with nothing in the address bar, not even about:blank) but also loads a blank new tab when Google Chrome is loaded. Could uMatrix be waiting for something to load as a document before it will disengage and let the web browser continue to load successfully? I can disable that extension and leave uBlock Origin and uMatrix enabled for a testing period (until encountering the next crash or hang) but I really am not going to leave Google Chrome pushing out the equivalent of Opera's speed dial "most visited" anti-privacy feature or wasting resources and bandwidth since it is rare that I ever load the web browser to go back to where I visited previously (that's what bookmarks are for). With that extension disabled, I will have Google Chrome configured for a home page using about:blank to, at least, eliminate that waste of resources when first loading the web browser.
I first encountered crashing and hangs when using uBlock Origin. Later I added uMatrix. I grew weary of the crashes and hangs (status = "waiting") with uBlock Origin so I disabled it and relied solely on uMatrix. However, since then several times the web browser hangs with a "waiting" status on the uMatrix extension.
Only seen this happen when loading Google Chrome (i.e., when it starts), not when the web browser has already successfully loaded and while navigating to various sites or their pages. On what is the web browser waiting for uMatrix to do?
With the web browser hung (stuck on "waiting" status for the uBlock or uMatrix extension), I'm not sure how I could do anything to track down the problem. The web browser is unresponsive (not even the tabs or addressbar are shown - empty chrome) so it's not like I could go into a console to check on errors.
Google Chrome 53.0.2785 64-bit (same problems back in v52) Windows 7 Home x64 SP-1
uBlock Origin 1.9.4 (currently disabled) uMatrix 0.9.3.3 (enabled - will probably disable it, too)