How to debug a Chrome browser extension which is crashing?

Question

I have developed a Chrome browser extension and, on rare occasion, it crashes (eg, a bubble appears in the upper-right stating "_____ has crashed! Click here to reload it.")

The problem is that when it does so, background.html disappears (dies) immediately, and I cannot find any information to help me debug what went wrong. I've opened chrome://crashes and see that there are entries there which might correspond to my issue, but the crash log only gives me a link to file a bug report (no ability to download or view the log).

Based upon this Goole entry on finding crash logs I've found some .dmp files, but they are essentially unreadable (the .dmp files seem to be some sort of un-symbolicated stack trace, or something of that nature).

Does anybody have a good way to debug Chrome extension crashes?

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EDIT: after further investigation, I have determined that chrome://crashes do not relate to my extension crashes. I just had a crash, yet the latest timestamp in chrome://crashes is from several hours ago.

Answer 1

I once had a similar issue and was able to figure out the root of the issue by starting chrome with verbose logging enabled. To start Google Chrome on Mac with verbose logging you'll need to open a terminal and run something similar to the following:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --enable-logging --v=1& 

Then watch the debug log file by tailing the log file.

tail -f ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/chrome_debug.log 

On Ubuntu try:

tail -f ~/.config/google-chrome/chrome_debug.log 

It's very chatty but it may be just enough to help you fix your issue.