This looks to be OOM related renderer crash and legitimately thrown when system is resource constrained.

By looking at the stack trace of the provided report ID-669fee5300000000 issue looks similar to bug 667388, Hence merging in to it. Feel free to undupe if it's a different issue.

Thanks!

The report says the crash IDs are probably unrelated and the reporter did not actually have a crash ID for the dark gray tab issue. Unduping until further investigation can be done.

As per the steps provided, Unable to reproduce the issue on Windows 10 for chrome version 55.0.2883.87. Tried both on Desktop and Dell Precision 3800 (Laptop). No grey color is observed on Tabs.

@ jasongross9: Can you please try resetting chrome, give a system restart and try again. Please update us with your observations.

Thanks.!

Your suggestion requires that I devote something like 20-30 hours to debugging this issue; it happens sufficiently irregularly that I expect I'd need that amount of time to get good statistics on how often it happens and under what use conditions, and then go for an equal amount of time with all of my extensions disabled.  (If by "reset chrome", you mean something that doesn't disable extensions, please clarify.)  I'm not willing to devote that much time to debugging chrome right now.  Do you have any suggestion for something I could do that would take less than twenty hours (ideally, something I could leave running to collect data on the background, or something I could do the next time this happens) to give you the relevant information about what's going on?

Happens regularly with me, at irregular intervals.

It's not a resource constraint -- 30% CPU usage, 8 GB RAM available on my system.

A complete shutdown of Chrome, or waiting a few hours, tends to resolve the issue but it's infuriating. It's been happening (ir)regularly since ~M48.

Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding requester "ranjitkan@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

 Issue 683764  has been merged into this issue.

Also happens on Linux and CrOS. Throwing more components at this. Here's my report from  issue 683764 :

Chrome Version: 56.0.2924.67 (Official Build) beta (64-bit)
OS: Windows 10.1

After having my Chrome instances running for a while, it suddenly
became... corrupted? I couldn't navigate new tabs anywhere.

This happened for both open profiles.

Some symptoms:

* Opening a new tab, or new window, shows the New Tab Page.
  * Clicking one of the popular sites causes all sites to disappear or
    otherwise glitch, changes the URL bar to the address of that site,
    and adds the Google "G" favicon to the left of the tab's "New Tab"
    title. It also turns the bookmark star on (blue) if that URL has
    been bookmarked.  But no navigation actually happens AFAICT.
  * After "navigating", the popular sites (if they're still showing,
    sometimes they just disappear) do not respond to any input.

* Opening an Incognito window or tab shows has similar behavior, except
  that the page contents are filled with a solid dark grey. No widgets
  or text inside the tab frame.
  * The tab title is "New Tab", but after attempting to navigate to a
    site via the address bar, the title becomes "Untitled" and a sad tab
    icon shows where the favicon would be. Again, the bookmark star
    becomes filled in for bookmarked sites. Other features of the
    omnibox like tab-to-search work too (insofar as they correctly
    change the URL, but navigation continues to not really happen).

* Opening a Chrome WebUI (e.g., 3-dot Chrome menu => Settings) tries to
  navigate the current tab to "chrome://settings" but the NTP continues
  to display.

* The web contents of existing tabs work just fine: I can interact,
  navigate by clicking on links, etc.  However, navigating via a
  bookmark or the omnibox causes fails to actually navigate. Also,
  opening a link in a new tab opens a crashed tab: solid dark grey web
  contents (no text/widgets), "Untitled" tab title, and sad-crash
  favicon next to tab title.

* Opening Help (3-dot Chrome menu => Help => Help center) opens a new
  tab at the support.google.com URL, but displays the same type of
  crashed page.

* Neither the Inspector nor the Dev Tools window in general cannot be
  opened with any of the methods I know about.

* Can't open Feedback.

"Visiting" chrome:restart restarted the browser.

UserAgentString: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.67 Safari/537.36

esprehn@ has filed several feedback reports after restarting, but we can't send feedback when this is happening. go/esprehn-chromebook-lockup

On CrOS, Ash seems to continue working normally.

 Issue 661093  has been merged into this issue.

 Issue 680175  has been merged into this issue.

 Issue 673436  has been merged into this issue.

Oldest repro I've found is from Nov 1, but that was 56.0.2902.0. That had an interesting snippet:

> chrome seems to jump back to normal functionality after a while (20-30 mins or so) and tabs function as normal

There is also a report from 54.0.2840.99 ( issue 673436 ) but I'm not sure whether that had exactly the same symptoms.

My Windows PC might be having issues outside of this Chrome bug. I just experienced a very similar issue, with new tabs being white, everything un-navigable, and inability to launch Feedback. Chrome's task manager showed all new tabs and extension bg pages being spawned in a single process with ID 0.

...But the rest of Windows was in a similar state, so it seems unlikely this particular instance is a Chrome bug. The crash ID is 297d8b9580000000. More details here if anyone cares: http://pastebin.com/raw/Q48iyPVi

Having experienced both issues, I do think the issue for this thread is some kind of failure to start new processes. But it's very weird for it to happen on both CrOS and Windows.

Cleaning up sheriffbot label "Needs-Review" label as a part of modified "Needs-Feedback" sheriffbot rule. [ref bug for cleanup 684919]

Is this actionable at this point in time? Is this something you can look into?

There's a lot going on in this bug, and a lot duped in.

I haven't seen this in a while.

Per comment #5 and #22, closing this for now. Reopen if it's happening consistently on one's machine.

Please reopen this; it's happening on a ~weekly basis on my laptop with  57.0.2987.133.  It's frequently preceded by notifications that extensions have crashed, and requires killing chrome in task manager and restarting it before I can get any new tabs to work.  It's bad enough that I've been considering switching my default browser to firefox.  If there's anything I can do to gather useful debugging information while it's happening, I can probably provide you with that information within the next week or two.

By the way, I can confirm that

> chrome seems to jump back to normal functionality after a while (20-30 mins or so) and tabs function as normal

from comment #14 is still often the case, when I don't need new tabs, and am willing to wait for half an hour or an hour.

Also, I will note that ctrl+clicking on a link to open a new tab works fine, and I believe navigating to new pages in that new tab also works fine (though I'm not sure about this second bit).  Sometimes I experience the dark gray background, and other times I experience the white background; yet other times, I get the empty-tab-google-page, but trying to navigate or search in that tab fails.

This issue seems to have been fixed in Canary, in  bug #645319 . I can
confirm it's still very much present in stable, but it seems to be a
duplicate of  bug 645319 .

This happens to me on almost a daily basis, and it's definitely not a resource issue.. I have an 8 core system, 4.0ghz with 32gb of ram, at the time it happened my CPU utilization was 1-2% and memory was at 17%

This same issue also happens on my work pc and only cropped a few months ago in my case, at work I don't use any extensions. Chrome is completely stock.. my computer's up-time at that point was only 4 hours, though I do usually run it for days on end.

Version 59.0.3071.115 (Official Build) (64-bit)