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Chrome extension silently stops seeing updates (message chunking no longer runs?) #2072

Description

@cebamps

Hello! I am reporting an issue my team has been encountering for the past few months, where the Redux DevTools extension for Chrome appears to sometimes get stuck. As in: the UI remains responsive, but it stops updating with new actions and the "commit" button appears to do nothing.

I believe I have identified the root cause in the content script. When a message sent to the background page is too big and the browser raises an error on postMessage, the script is meant to recover and attempt to chunk the message into smaller messages.

However this error handling assumes a fixed error message (current main branch):

if (
(err as Error).message ===
'Message length exceeded maximum allowed length.'
) {

On my current Chrome install (Version 149.0.7827.201) this is the message I observe instead:

Message exceeded maximum allowed size of 64MiB.

I believe the original regression happened with this October 2025 change in Chromium: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/6e12249bb20a2aaf40f8b115e2ea07627c13f144. Impact on extensions was discussed in review but that concern was dismissed. Note that the message was changed again since (from 64MB to 64MiB).

In Redux DevTools, this means that chunking in contentScript/index.ts is no longer attempted, and instead the message channel is silently disconnected.

Worth noting that the background page also has its own chunking logic handling the same error message, but I didn't look into that one.

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