Hm that is extremely worrying. Do you have any extensions running which could be causing odd behavior? If it isn't too much trouble, it might make sense to try disabling them, or browsing for a bit with a new profile.

Otherwise the best thing we can do is capture some data when you're in this weird blank state. One thing you could try is to try to navigation to about:net-internals or about:tracing.

These tools (if they load properly) will give you tools to log what is happening when you try to load new tabs.

Going to add Needs-Feedback to this, because unless we get some actionable data, there isn't much we can do here.

This problem happens so rarely that I didn't see it happen since I reported it, and I use chromium very frequently usually with many tabs open at once.But I had it happen several times over last year or so on 2 different computers, and I've seen it also happen on google chrome on windows.

When it happens I will try not to close it and get as much information as I can.

Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding requester "csharrison@chromium.org" for another review and adding "Needs-Review" label for tracking.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

Overriding sherrifbot

I was able to reproduce the issue again, but this time it's a bit different. All pages including already loaded pages are empty. 

It turns out that it sometimes happens when I right click on page, select inspect and in the newly opened thing drag&drop something somewhere else. It doesn't happen always, and when it doesn't happen the first time, it won't happen no matter how many times I try.

I will try to avoid closing the browser this time. Here are requested information:

When I opened Settings page to see list of extensions, it was also blank. But I could save the page as html. So I did it, and found link to the etensions page there and downloaded this. I attached the Extensions.html file.

After saving about:net-internals and openign it in firefox I knew what was there so I was able to blindly clock the button and export the data. 

By viewing tracing page in google chrome window on another computer and clicking in the right places I was able to export tracing data (rendering, hopefully).

These files are also attached.
What I also noticed:

When I right click on different parts of the empty page it shows different context menu, as if the page was loaded.

Deleted: Extensions.html 70.9 KB

Extensions.html 70.9 KB View Download

Deleted: net-internals-log.json 1.3 MB

net-internals-log.json 1.3 MB View Download

Deleted: trace_tracing-saved.json.gz 7.8 MB

trace_tracing-saved.json.gz 7.8 MB Download

Also, I forgot to write it before:

I'm not sure if this is what I was supposed to be doing, but I guessed it would provide some more real data. When running tracing, I refreshed some pages that I had open and loaded google.com in new tab. (pages that I had open: https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie/cairo-dock , https://backports.debian.org/Instructions/ , https://backports.debian.org/ )

Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding requester "csharrison@chromium.org" for another review and adding "Needs-Review" label for tracking.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

I'm not sure what's happening here, so I'm moving this back on the triage queue for the current rotation to take a look.

I also ran chromium from console now, I attached a file with everything that showed in console. 

Deleted: chromium.log 3.2 KB

chromium.log 3.2 KB View Download

Seems to be more an issue with the window manager or drawing. Changing components.

Cleaning up "Needs-Review" label as we are not using this label for triage anymore. Ref bug for this cleanup 684919

Issue has not been modified or commented on in the last 365 days, please re-open or file a new bug if this is still an issue.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot