Google Chrome extension: Mac Compatibility

Question

I've this Tab Sugar Google Chrome extension which works fine under Windows: when installed, the user can click on its icon right in the browser, and access the Tab Sugar dashboard, as a new page in a new tab.

But for some reason, it doesn't seem to work at all on Google Chrome under OSX: users experience that nothing happens when clicking on the extension icon. Nothing at all. No new tab.

Since I don't own any Mac, any help on this subject would be more than welcomed!

1. Be sure you use a Mac and Google Chrome (or Chromium)
2. Then install the Tab Sugar extension
3. Click on the extension icon in the browser
4. If nothing happens, then you just reproduced

5. Open the background.html page in a new tab:

   chrome-extension://libokbfffpaopdjmeofdfpmlanaenaje/background.html

6. Open the developer traces console (Ctrl+Shift+i)

7. Try to understand what's going on there?!

Edit: As an alternative, Tab Sugar's code is browsable from its GitHub repository.

Edit 2: An issue was reported on this specific subject

Answer 1

Hi Arnaud,

I have grabbed a Macbook (since I don't have one). And your extension crashes on Mac, I can verify that. It is quite amusing why it wont crash on Windows. But it is a bug on Chrome's side, not your extension.

TO figure out the problem, I was bisecting your code to see where it was crashing, the result was Google Analytics. If you comment out the Google Analytics code in your extension, it will work perfectly under the Mac.

Then I realize that it is a known MacOSX bug, I remember a user named Daniel on the Chrome Extension mailing list had the same issue, from looking at the Issue Tracker, it is a known issue. You can follow this issue by starring the following tracker.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=43400

This was a tricky bug to find, but currently it has been assigned by an Engineer on the Chrome team, and hopefully a fix will be available. In the meantime, you can remove the analytics code and it will work just fine.

If you have any more problems, don't hesitate to contact me directly!