Crash on open - guessing reloaded tab, how to remove?

lorax3

I opened this page and Vivaldi crashed and now can't open Vivaldi anymore: https://www.cars.com/articles/cargo-specs-be-careful-what-you-compare-1420696442243/

Vivaldi is set to always reopen previous tabs on startup, and now every time it starts, it crashes immediately. I have tried to Ctrl+F4 to close that tab before it loads, but it's too quick and I never get the chance. This sounds similar to this thread in Linux: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/91724/vivaldi-crashes-when-opening-certain-sites-suspecting-sso

I opened up the latest %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\User Data\Default\Sessions\Session_ in a hex editor and searched for "cars.com" and made them all says "bars.com" hoping that would break it. Now when Vivaldi loads, I see "bars.com" in the URL, but it is still loading the page data from cache somewhere as it's the original cars.com site and it still crashes immediately. Where is this cached copy stored and how do I remove that?

I am more than a bit of a tab hoarder, so if possible, I'd like to remove this one site and still open my old session. If that's not possible, I just want to be able to use Vivaldi again.

Pathduck

@lorax3 Hi - I'm afraid there's no easy way out of such a mess without nuking your Sessions folder.

Cache is stored in folders like:
Cache
Code Cache
DawnCache
File System
GPUCache
IndexedDB
Local Storage
Service Worker
Session Storage

It should be safe to delete these folders, and they will be recreated on startup. I guess that's the easiest if it really is "cache" as you say (I kind of doubt it but still...)

Did you have tabs set to lazy loading? It's the default setting.

I guess this is why I don't hoard tabs. There really should be a vaccine against such illnesses of the mind

lorax3

Looks like deleting those cleaned up some disk space, but didn't help the crashing. I could barely get a screenshot of my doctored URL (bars.com) with the original actual page (cars.com) so I have no idea where it's getting that content from.

I used to be more careful about my tab hoarding in Vivaldi's early days because it was less consistent about keeping them around. It's been so good for so long I never give it a second thought anymore. I'll keep poking, and until then, use one of the three other browsers I have installed (yay web development).

Also, I don't know if Vivaldi devs are on here, but is there any useful information about the crash itself that someone would like to have before I wipe my profile and start anew?

lorax3

Solution found: right click the taskbar icon to get Vivaldi's jump list (I think that's what that's called) and select New Tab. Now when Vivaldi opens, it opens a new tab, and all my other tabs still exist but in an unloaded state (I assume this is the default lazy loading you mentioned). I can now close that problematic tab without displaying it.

Pathduck

@lorax3 Good workaround, I'll try to remember next time some poor tab hoarder with the same symptoms comes along (it's more often than you'd think...)

Read about saving sessions:
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/session-management/

There's also a "secret" (beta) Sessions Panel that allows for automatic saving of sessions, see: vivaldi://experiments/

In your case that doesn't seem all that useful, since you couldn't launch the browser at all. But saved sessions are files with the .bin extensions in the Sessions folder, along with the sessions.json file. So you could've deleted the Tabs_ files but left the saved sessions.

And FYI I couldn't make Vivaldi crash with the Cars website, no matter what. Sometimes you're just unlucky, a bad ad iframe gets loaded and the browser goes down. IMO adblocking goes a long way to avoid these things.

lorax3

Agreed, and I do have uBlock Origin and Disconnect running. It's the first time I've had a repeated hard crash like that with Vivaldi. Sometimes if I've had my bajillion tabs open, plus a separate instance for streaming music, all for weeks on end without restart or reboot, it'll croak once and come back fine. Just bad luck, I guess. The cars.com website was just a search result hit, so not something I hit with any frequency to know if it's anything other than bad luck.