Chromium fails to load active tab on startup

General system Applications
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Hi all, I have a weird issue with the Chromium web browser. My first question is whether others are seeing the same (i.e. likely a bug). My second (if it’s just me) is what can I do to fix it?

The problem is that in startup settings at chrome://settings/onStartup I use the “Continue where you left off” option so that all tabs/windows get restored when I reopen the application. What happens though is that when I start the browser, the tab that is active (showing when the window appears) gets stuck loading.

What I mean by this is that the web site icon on the tab shows activity (loading) and sits there forever, never completing and showing an empty tab forever. I have to copy the URL, close the tab, open a new one, paste the URL and press enter to get the site to load.

Note that it’s not even a network issue! If I exit the browser with a “settings” tab showing (e.g. the URL is chrome://settings) and then restart it, then the settings tab does not load! It just stays empty forever showing nothing with the icon having a “rotating circle” animation around it as if something is “loading”.

Note that this happens EVERY restart reliably (not a random thing) and also that the reload button is showing an “X” icon (i.e. to stop loading). Pressing on X turns the button into the circular arrow for reload but the tab icon is still animating the circle around it as if it is “loading in progress”. Hitting reload at this point does nothing BUT eventually I get the pop-up dialog saying “the page is unresponsive” and if I press “exit” I get the “Aw Snap!” tab with “SIGILL” showing when I press “Learn more”.

So, is anyone else experiencing this?

What can I do to fix it?

P.S. Here is the package info:

$ yay -Qi chromium
Name            : chromium
Version         : 97.0.4692.71-2
Description     : A web browser built for speed, simplicity, and security
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : https://www.chromium.org/Home
Licenses        : BSD
Groups          : None
Provides        : None
Depends On      : gtk3  nss  alsa-lib  xdg-utils  libxss  libcups  libgcrypt  ttf-liberation  systemd  dbus  libpulse
                  pciutils  libva  desktop-file-utils  hicolor-icon-theme  fontconfig  libjpeg  icu  flac  snappy
                  libxml2  ffmpeg  libwebp  minizip  opus  harfbuzz  re2  libxslt  libpng  freetype2
Optional Deps   : pipewire: WebRTC desktop sharing under Wayland [installed]
                  kdialog: support for native dialogs in Plasma
                  org.freedesktop.secrets: password storage backend on GNOME / Xfce [installed]
                  kwallet: support for storing passwords in KWallet on Plasma
Required By     : None
Optional For    : None
Conflicts With  : None
Replaces        : None
Installed Size  : 252.71 MiB
Packager        : Evangelos Foutras <foutrelis@archlinux.org>
Build Date      : Sun 09 Jan 2022 12:00:11 GMT
Install Date    : Sun 09 Jan 2022 17:31:18 GMT
Install Reason  : Explicitly installed
Install Script  : No
Validated By    : Signature
2

I just fired up Chromium, set it up to “Continue where you left off”, opend a few tabs with different urls and also some with chrome://xxxx. After closing the browser and restarting it, everything came back again. So on my end I am not having the issue.

Perhaps you could create a new profile and test if you experience the issue with the new one as well. This for eliminating the possibility of a “corrupt” profile.

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Thanks for confirming this! I had already tried a fresh profile and it did not work…

I kept digging though, since it seemed like a setup issue, and discovered the following error message:

[16600:16600:0117/114500.774301:ERROR:gl_surface_egl.cc(783)] EGL Driver message (Critical) eglInitialize: Internal Vulkan error (-3): Initialization of an object could not be completed for implementation-specific reasons, in ../../third_party/angle/src/libANGLE/renderer/vulkan/RendererVk.cpp, initialize:1068.
[16600:16600:0117/114500.774337:ERROR:gl_surface_egl.cc(1391)] eglInitialize SwANGLE failed with error EGL_NOT_INITIALIZED
[16600:16600:0117/114500.774359:ERROR:gl_ozone_egl.cc(20)] GLSurfaceEGL::InitializeOneOff failed.                       
[16600:16600:0117/114500.776080:ERROR:viz_main_impl.cc(161)] Exiting GPU process due to errors during initialization    
[16615:16615:0117/114500.791007:ERROR:gpu_init.cc(457)] Passthrough is not supported, GL is disabled, ANGLE is

So something to do with GL. I therefore disabled hardware acceleration by going to chrome://settings/system and turning off “Use hardware acceleration when available” and the issue has been fixed.

So, not ideal but at least it works.

Interestingly, I’ve installed both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge to compare, and they both seem to be fine with that setting enabled. Perhaps Chromium is using newer versions of graphics libraries that are not stable yet?

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