Ungoogled-chromium: Crash on startup with user data directory having an associated Google account

Created on 26 Oct 2018 · 10Comments · Source: Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Originated from https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/567#issuecomment-433194097. The browser unconditionally crashed on startup when the Google account was still tied to the user data directory.

Ideally, the browser shouldn't crash and just ignore the Google account. The user would then have the freedom to launch regular Chromium and still have the Google account. However, I don't mind if the solution must strip the Google account to preserve settings from the profile.

bug

Source

Eloston

All 10 comments

i should mention that i logged in in chromium 70.
after cleaning cache, cookies and everything but boomarks, everything become right

s1nceri7y on 26 Oct 2018

UC will become very different in internals from chromium overtime...
Why not just use a separate profile folder ?

intika on 26 Oct 2018

👍1

@intika

UC will become very different in internals from chromium overtime...

Could you elaborate? What factors are contributing to this?

Eloston on 26 Oct 2018

@Eloston for me personally uc is a full replacement of chromium so it does not matter, but here is why it could be useful to have a different profile location for uc

First i think most classic users are considering uc as a complete different browser (even if technically its a patched chromium)
What i meant is the more features that come in the more the browser will be different from chromium... and uc is likely to be having growing features numbers

In the case where both browsers are used and or migration from chromium to uc :

Flags : some flags are present here but not there and it could potentially lead to crash/loosing-settings i don't know exactly how chromium deal with unknown flags but it could be a source of problem
Out of the box experience (An old profile could lead to problems like https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/567)
Version mismatch : chromium does not like when a profile is used with a previous version and even show an error when we do so... (in case chromium/uc version mismatch)
We could have a lot of arguments in each side but at the end of the day uc is not chromium

Any way just developing what i was talking about... but for me its not something that i would put a lot of effort/energy in... nor bothering making the change... in the other hand the bug have to be fixed so...

intika on 28 Oct 2018

@intika

Flags : some flags are present here but not there and it could potentially lead to crash/loosing-settings i don't know exactly how chromium deal with unknown flags but it could be a source of problem

I believe chrome://flags come and go all the time, so unknown flags may be dropped.

We could have a lot of arguments in each side but at the end of the day uc is not chromium

Sure, but trying to separate from Chromium violates the drop-in replacement goal of ungoogled-chromium.

If bi-directional compatibility with Chromium is not possible at some point in the future, I'd still like to support importing Chromium profiles.

Eloston on 31 Oct 2018

👍1

so may be cleaning the profile on first run as @s1nceri7y mentioned... but some users may not like being disconnected... does this issue deserve changing the code at all ?

intika on 31 Oct 2018

If this can't be fixed practically with a code change, I would at least like some utility to strip out the Google account so ungoogled-chromium can read the profile data.

Eloston on 31 Oct 2018

Hi!
I'd like to leave a note that it seems to kinda work by logging out the profile and then removing "site settings", "passwords and other sign-in data", "autofill form data" and "hosted app data". It allows ungoogled chromium to start without crashing (I did a backup of my profile folder and experimented removing some stuff to see where it would start working)

I say kinda work because even though ungoogled chromium starts, I'm still experimenting ocasional core dumps (It consistently happens when a website I'm logged asks for permission to send me notifications)