PB is unresponsive, google.com/url pages don't load

[mahrud]

First, sorry if this issue exists elsewhere, I could not find a close enough match.

Symptoms:

• clicking on some links in google products (gmail, calendar, etc.) results on a new tab with address google.com/url?q=... which stays blank and keeps loading indefinitely
• clicking on the PB logo opens a white box like this:
  
• clicking on PB extension options opens a blank tab with no content
• removing PB seems to solve the gmail links issue, and installing it again brings back the problem
• further, after reinstalling PB a "first time" tab opens that keeps loading indefinitely.

I'm using Privacy Badger 2025.5.30 on Chrome 137.0.7151.55 running on Fedora 42.

A potential contributing factor might be that I have an obscene number of tabs open. Does PB need to process every tab during initial setup?

[ghostwords]

Hello and thanks for opening an issue!

It looks like PB is pretty fundamentally broken, and the google.com/url thing (Google link tracking redirect removal) is a symptom of a bigger problem.

Does PB need to process every tab during initial setup?

Good guess, PB does try to read in tab data so that it can initialize its internal bookkeeping, but PB no longer waits on the tab query to complete on startup. Looking up tabs shouldn't hold anything up, but it's possible that the act of looking up tabs freezes PB.

[ghostwords]

Could you navigate to chrome://extensions, enable "Developer mode" in the upper right corner (if it isn't already enabled), and click the "service worker" link inside Privacy Badger's listing on this page?

If a developer tools window pops up, we want to see the contents of the Console tab in that window.

[ghostwords]

Also, have you had PB installed and working already for some time and this started recently, or did you recently install PB and immediately ran into this issue?

[mahrud]

The service worker link says "(Inactive)" next to it and the console tab of devtools is empty, but I looked around and after clicking stop and start under the corresponding worker in chrome://serviceworker-internals/, I got the following:

bootstrap.js:64 0.00s           Initializing Privacy Badger ...
bootstrap.js:64 0.04s 35ms      Initialized widgets from disk
bootstrap.js:64 0.07s 37ms      [DNR] Cleared session rules
bootstrap.js:64 0.07s           [DNR] Ready to generate dynamic/session rule IDs
bootstrap.js:64 0.07s 2ms       Trying to read from storage.local
Fetch finished loading: GET "<URL>".
...
Fetch finished loading: GET "<URL>".
bootstrap.js:64 0.09s 16ms      [DNR] Registered Google redirect bypass session rules
bootstrap.js:64 0.49s 404ms     Successfully read from storage.local
bootstrap.js:64 0.50s 2ms       Storage is ready
bootstrap.js:64 0.50s 1ms       pbconfig already initialized from disk
bootstrap.js:64 0.50s           Reading from storage.session ...
bootstrap.js:64 0.54s 41ms      Clearing tracker data ...
bootstrap.js:64 0.68s 138ms     Done reading from storage.session
bootstrap.js:64 0.68s 2ms       Loading seed data ...
bootstrap.js:64 1.37s 692ms     Seed data loaded successfully
bootstrap.js:64 1.42s 46ms      Initialization complete

Also, on the serviceworker-internals page I saw this log:

Console: {"lineNumber":-1,"message":"Service Worker is not responding.","message_level":0,"sourceIdentifier":7,"sourceURL":"chrome-extension://pkehgijcmpdhfbdbbnkijodmdjhbjlgp/js/background.js"}
Console: {"lineNumber":-1,"message":"Service Worker termination by a timeout timer was canceled because DevTools is attached.","message_level":0,"sourceIdentifier":7,"sourceURL":"chrome-extension://pkehgijcmpdhfbdbbnkijodmdjhbjlgp/js/background.js"}
Console: {"lineNumber":-1,"message":"Service Worker is not responding.","message_level":0,"sourceIdentifier":7,"sourceURL":"chrome-extension://pkehgijcmpdhfbdbbnkijodmdjhbjlgp/js/background.js"}

Also, have you had PB installed and working already for some time and this started recently, or did you recently install PB and immediately ran into this issue?

I think I've had this issue on and off I think, and I've definitely been able to click on the PB logo to disable it on individual websites in that time, but I'm not certain.

[mahrud]

You're gonna laugh or potentially judge my open tabs but this is what I see under the network tab:

It's strange that about 1/3 of them remain pending and not loading. This is the content of one of the requests, and the rest look the same:

I'll investigate what happened in the middle that stopped the loading, but why is cache-control set to no-cache?

[ghostwords]

I think it's no-cache because (a) the icon is a local extension resource, and (b) that's just how Chrome implemented this.

Your PB service worker console log looks fine to me. I think the fact that you weren't previously able to open the dev tools window at all suggests the problem is inside of Chrome extensions code. PB's service worker gets stuck somehow.

I wonder if this is related to #3100, something about the specific optimized icon PNG file that we started using as of version 2025.5.14.

[mahrud]

Update: I enabled logging errors and noticed a bunch have accumulated:

I don't see an obvious way to export them all, but let me know if you'd like me to manually copy paste the content of some or all of them.

[ghostwords]

Thanks for the info!

The Global Privacy Control errors are unrelated.

The "source image could not be decoded" errors suggest this is the same problem as what I attempted to address by #3100.

[mahrud]

This happened again (this time on Brave browser with ~340 tabs open). I noticed that sometimes when I reload PB there is ~1000 bradger-NN.png requests, but sometimes there are no requests upon reload until I open or reload tabs, then I get a few notifications per tab. Not sure what that depends on, but I noticed in the first case PB crashes if there are more than 1000 requests.