What can cause a Chrome browser extension to crash?

Question

My browser extension is crashing occasionally. The problem is, I cannot find a good, comprehensive list of things that can cause an extension to crash, and thus am having a hard time creating a checklist of things to work with.

My assumption is that anything that causes a standard Chrome tab to crash would cause the extension to crash when run in the Background.html file.

Off the top of my head, I'm assuming the following could cause problems...

• Infinite loops or other instances of a script becoming unresponsive
• Uncaught exceptions (eg, a JSON.parse with no try/catch)
• Database storage errors
• Excessive resource usage (??)

That's really all I can think of. I'm having a heck of a time trying to debug my extension and would really appreciate any help creating a checklist...

Answer 1

I'm coming back to this question about 3 months after asking it because a 2nd extension of mine was also crashing. In this case, though, the extension was far simpler -- only about 40 lines of code in the background.js script.

2 operations seemed to be possible culprits: writing to localStorage and using console.log

I have previously observed that it is possible to crash a normal chrome tab by using console.log repeatedly with large objects in a website if you leave the page open for an extended period. Because background.js is always open, it seems like a likely culprit here.

tl;dr Don't use console.log in production. Ever.