Problem With Chromium 89.0.4389.82

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I am running CentOS 7 and just updated chromium to version 89.0.4389.82 from EPEL.

Although this version was released a few weeks ago, I had had the previous version of chromium (88.0.4324.150) running for several weeks but it crashed and the new version was then loaded.

The older version worked fine but this new one refuses to load certain, ie most, websites that the old version did not have a problem with – it is jus stuck waiting for the domain in question. Further, the version of Firefox I also have installed loads all of them without any problems which suggests there is not a problem with those sites, the DNS resolution, nor with my system apart from chromium.

Rpm does not allow me to downgrade to the previous version and cannot find the previous version. I remember having a similar problem loading websites at least a year ago which, if I remember correctly, was due to some bug in chromium.

Does anyone have a similar problem?

21 thoughts on - Problem With Chromium 89.0.4389.82

  • Do you have firefox set to use DoH? That could change the perspective of whether there is a DNS issue.

    With CentOS-7 you can use chrome, you don’t have to use chromium.

    I use the rpms for chrome, for both the stable and beta releases

  • Understood. I checked and I cannot see that I am using DoH (DNS over https?) in Firefox. Since I have a vague memory of having had a similar problem with chromium in the past, I highly suspect it is a bug in the browser.

    Where can I find the older release, ie 88.0.4324.150 of chromium? It is no longer in EPEL.

  • Thank you, I downgraded to chromium 88.0.423.150 and chromium-common.

    Unfortunately I lost all saved tabs in multiple windows which is a major bummer. I normally unceremoniously kill the chromium process and when it restarts I reload existing tabs, but while doing the above downgrade I managed to lose all of that information. I had ca five windows and altogether well over 200 tabs open…

    Googling – in Firefox – I found that in ~/.config/chromium/Default/Sessions are the key files that one should probably backup every so often to avoid the above. I had not. I also found an addon, Session Buddy, that allows the user to save session information. I did have OneTab since earlier but had not saved tabs there for over a month…

    In this teachable experience, I will be recreating most windows and tabs, very wasteful of time. The only upside is that it allows me to clean up the tabs…

    Anyway, even after downgrading I have problems with a lot of websites whereas those I load with IP addresses directly are fine. So, after all, maybe it is some kind of DNS issue?? Maybe the problematic websites all use some third-party resource a DNS issue interferes with?? Firefox 78.9.0esr continues to load all websites fine.

    Amy ideas how to debug this?

  • Here are two typical examples: (1) nytimes.com does not load at all, ie completely white page, although I get the title of the website in the browser menu bar and the tab title, (2) fidelity.com allows me to log in but then the next page seems to have loaded completely but I cannot click on any links, ie it has not loaded fully.

    Does anyone recognize this type of problem?

  • No, just checked that Javascript is allowed in the browser settings. When I load the browser and try to access eg nytimes.com I see “Establishing secure connection” in the bottom infobar and that’s where it seems to get stuck.

    I wonder if some other software was also updated and the new version of that not loaded until I had to reload the browser and is the root cause of the problem??

  • Continuing to research this and while googling – using Firefox since that does not work either for me right now – I found some mention of a temporary fix of changing proxy settings. I went to the Advanced/proxy settings in my chromium and get an error message:

    —

    When running Chromium under a supported desktop environment, the system proxy settings will be used. However, either your system is not supported or there was a problem launching your system configuration.

    But you can still configure via the command line. Please see |man chromium-browser| for more information on flags and environment variables.

    —

    Very weird. I have not used a proxy on this computer but this might be the reason for my problem? Anyone else have had similar problem?

  • Some of our users wanted Chrome instead of Firefox so we installed Chromium from EPEL for them. Over the time, we had several problems where a build didn’t work and also updates were not in time. We also had problems where some people were able to run chromium while others were unable to launch it with their profile, even on the same host.

    We solved the issue by removing chromium completely and told our users that Firefox has to be used :-)

    Regards, Simon

  • I understand but Firefox does not render all pages correctly as it seems to misinterpret css. And, it is always to have more than one browser installed as I have just discovered.

    I found a work-around: launching chromium-browser from a terminal window with the argument –no-proxy-server. This launches the sites I listed in my post without any problems. It thus seems the proxy settings somehow have been messed up, perhaps one time when I unceremoniously killed the app from the command line…

    I now need to find out how to reset the proxy settings in chromium since I am unable to access it from the settings menu in the browser.

  • Hm, It seems I am wrong on the above. I tried adding –no-proxy-server to the settings in my Mate menu and then start the browser – failure with the same problem as before. I then went back to the command line and just started it with chromium-browser, without the –no-proxy-server argument and it starts fine.

    So, it seems to have something to do with starting it from the desktop vs the terminal window.

    Weird. Ideas?

  • Is there a reason to still be trying to use chromium, rather than chrome? Later releases of chrome didn’t work with CentOS-6, hence chromium, but c-6 is now EOL. My experience is that chrome (from the google repository) works fine with CentOS-7.

  • Curiouser and curiouser. The above did fix some issues but I am still having issues with sites that worked fine a little while ago…

    Is something at Google responsible for this problem?

  • In one of your (numerous) previous messages you said that Firefox wasn’t working properly either, so I’d say it’s not a problem with Google unless you’re using their dns servers or something similar to that.

    It may be a problem with your ISP, it may be a problem local to your individual computer, or it may be a problem with your local network.

    You can isolate that using basic troubleshooting techniques.

    Or maybe Chromium is just plain broken. I get the impression that few people are using it.

  • You are right and I installed chrome from the google repository. Worked fine out of the box. I proceeded to move (1) Session Buddy, (2) bookmarks from chromium to chrome which also went fine. Prior to that I had installed the very same extensions I had been using on chromium to chrome.

    One thing remains: I would also like to move my entire browsing history from chromium to chrome but am not sure which physical files I need to copy? There does not seem to be a function for exporting browsing history to another browser but I would love to be corrected.

  • Further progress – found an extension that allows me to export history, up to 90 days which is the maximum chrome/chromium stores, into a json file from chromium. But, I am still searching for a way to /import/ it into chrome. Have not found an extension for that yet, nor does there seem to be a setting for importing history, only bookmarks.

  • On my C7 box, Google Chrome uses the file

    “/home/%user%/.config/google-chrome/Default/History”

    for history. It’s a SQLite format 3 file, try moving it into the same Chromium
    ‘Default’ folder, and see if that works. There are other files there that could be copied over as well, Bookmarks, Cookies, Preferences, etc.

  • No, I said Firefox worked fine. I was speculating on some introduced incompatibility between chromium and Google code used on many websites.

  • I looked at that file in chromium and it is a text file with SQL statements whereas in chrome it is a binary file. I do not dare move it over, who knows what might be tied into some part of it…