Update: @rotron pointed me at this Chrome bug report, which seems to be the culprit. In their last update, Google auto-installed a YouTube app for everyone who didn't have any apps installed. This app will break bookmarklets on any YouTube page. The workaround is to delete the YouTube app (open a new tab, right click youtube, delete) and restart Chrome.
A number of users have been reporting an intermittent bug when using a Pinboard bookmarklet in Chrome. They click on the bookmarklet, and all that shows up is a window with 'about:blank' in the URL field.
I've been able to reproduce this reliably on my own machine by visiting YouTube and clicking the bookmarklet. But some other people with what seems to be an identical version of Chrome (16.0.912.63 on OS 10.7 with no extensions installed ) don't see the bug.
Since the bookmarklet is kind of complicated, I reduced the problem to this test case:
Drag this to your bookmarks bar: dragme
Go to www.youtube.com.
Click the bookmarklet
Here's what I see after about thirty seconds:
My question to the Internets is: can anyone reproduce this behavior? And as a chrome novice, how do I go about chasing this bug?
I know from trying this on URLs I control that the new window runs all the expected HTTP requests for the target page before it hangs.
Any help you can give me (@Pinboard on Twitter or support@pinboard.in) will be most welcome.
—maciej on December 22, 2011
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