Chrome extension disabled "This extension may have been corrupted" Chrome 63.0.3239.84

Question

I have a private Chrome extension that opens a text box and uses input from the textbox to open URLs in new tabs. It was working fine until this past weekend when the Chrome update prompted a new "This extension may have been corrupted" error. On Windows, Chrome will disable the extension, on OSX it will crash Chrome. On both, loading the extension unpacked works fine, only when it is packed into a .crx does it prompt the error.

As far as I can tell, there are no misspelled file paths. What could be the issue?

manifest.json

{
"browser_action":
{
"default_icon": "multi_search.png",
"default_popup": "multi_search.html"
},
"description": "Opens multiple urls in new tabs.",
"manifest_version": 2,
"name": "Multi Search",
"permissions": [ "tabs" ],
"version": "1.2"
}

Answer 1

I had the same problem too, I found the answer at the bottom of this Google Chrome thread: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/chrome/kGgLwnrDKpQ;context-place=forum/chrome

Basically you will need to add an update_url value to your manifest.json. The URL can be any valid URL you want if you're not making using of that value, e.g. "http://0.0.0.0".

In your case this would be:

{
"browser_action":
{
"default_icon": "multi_search.png",
"default_popup": "multi_search.html"
},
"description": "Opens multiple urls in new tabs.",
"manifest_version": 2,
"name": "Multi Search",
"update_url": "http://www.example.com/update.xml",
"permissions": [ "tabs" ],
"version": "1.2"
}

If you want information on actually making use of that feature, Google has this Autoupdating developer page: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/autoupdate